Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - What The Ancient Greeks Got Wrong About The Female Body

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

Why did the Ancient Greeks depict a womb as an octopus in their textbooks?Their writings and (mis)understandings of the female body might seem borderline comical now, but how did these beliefs on the physical indicators of womanhood still impact us today?Joining Kate is Helen King, author of Immaculate Forms: A History of the Female Body in Four Parts, to explore Ancient Greeks beliefs on breasts, clitoris, hymen and the womb.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code BETWIXTYou can take part in our listener survey here.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. My lovely betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am here once more. And thank God you are here, because if you're not here, it's just some mad northern woman chatting to a microphone all by herself.

So I'm thrilled that you're here, but before we can go any further, I have to tell you. This is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults, but adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too.

And now that we've told you that, You can't get angry if you happen to continue listening and get offended because fair do's, you were warned. Ah, good afternoon. I'm just taking a stroll through the Garden of Eden. Beautiful day for it, isn't it? Well, every day is beautiful here because it's paradise. That was the deal. And let me tell you, the fruit is delicious and plentiful. Don't just take my word for it. Ask Eve. She's got loads of these apples over there. Mind you, she's busy chatting to that snake at the moment, so if you want an apple too, I'd get over there pretty quick. But apples and other fruity, nature-based imagery

have always played a central part in how women's bodies are described. From the depiction of breasts as apples to the clitoris as a rose and of course the supposed de-flowering of the hymen. What do these depictions of women and their bodies tell us about their place in the world? and even shaped the way they've experienced it through history. Well, let's get out of this garden to find out. What do you look for in a man? Oh, money, of course.

You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning enough and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I feel so done. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. with me, Kate Lister. What defines a woman? That's a tricky question and it's one that's been wrestled with throughout history and is still very much being debated today. Of course, most of the

people who've been having these debates in history have been, well, not the women, not by a long shot. But thankfully, I am joined by a truly spectacular woman today, Professor Helen King, author of Immaculate Forms, uncovering the history of women's bodies, to explore how four body parts in particular, breasts, clitoris, hymen and the womb have been thought of, defined, and yet misunderstood, from the ancient world to the modern day. I am ready if you are. Oh, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Professor Helen King. How are you doing? It seems like yesterday we were talking before, but well, here we are again. I had so much fun talking to you last time about Greek gynecology. I mean, who else would I be talking to about Greek gynecology? That's

whole thing. Would that be your mastermind subject if you were on mastermind? Yes, I think it would actually. Yeah, ancient Greek gynecology. And we're here, well, we're here just because you're awesome and I like talking to you, but we're also here because you have a new book out, Immaculate Forms, A History of Women's Bodies. What is this book about, Helen? Well, now, so for years and years, I wanted to bring all the stuff I've been working on together. So it's the ancient Greek stuff. But because ancient Greek medicine was so important through Western history, sort of rediscovered in the Renaissance, you know, new books written about it. And until things like the circulation of the blood turned up in the 17th century, ancient Greek

gynecology was unchallenged. So I really wanted to think about the longer history. And of course, even when I say circulation of the blood, just because they found out the blood circulates, didn't stop them thinking that actually women's blood was much like it always had been. It was sort of produced by food and drink. Women's flesh is spongy. Well, you know, we're sort of more curvy than chaps often, aren't we? Not always. So spongy flesh, and that absorbs all the fluid from the diet, and it has to come out every month. If it doesn't, you know, you're dead, basically. So that sort of idea that women were dominated by blood didn't really go away, even when circulation was discovered, because menstruation was somehow outside all that.

It's so strange that Greek, and it wasn't just gynecology, but that's your specialism, but medicine, that it stayed unchallenged for centuries. And I've never, understood why that is? Because now, like, students who finish med school, half of what they've learned in that time is obsolete, it moves that fast. But for hundreds of years, we were just going, well, that's what the Greeks said. Why were we doing that? It is interesting, isn't it? So it's something there about the position that the Greeks and the Romans have in our culture, in Western civilizations, that they're the origin of everything. So architecture, for example, you know, you've got neoclassical architecture even now where people try and shove pillars on things and

make them look classical. We sort of want to go back to the classics. And there's some sort of thing going on there too with medicine about how bodies can't have changed because surely bodies are always the same. So therefore medicine doesn't really need to change. Whether it does, of course, we know that and particularly ways of seeing inside the body. One of the things about my book is I go from breasts to clitoris to hymen to womb. So I'm going inside the body. body from the things you can see and have always been able to see, to the things that have been more difficult to see, or indeed impossible to see. And so there's something there about if you're looking at the outsides, doesn't look like much has changed. Well, true, probably

inside not much has changed, but we didn't really know about that. So I think it's a really interesting question why my ancient Greek medicine has lasted so long. And I think it's about authority, the authority of the past. Yeah. Like once something becomes established and once all the other doctors are saying, no, this is what the Greek said. I suppose it becomes even harder to challenge it. There must have been people, though, reading through the Greek stuff going, this doesn't quite sound right to me, guys. It's really interesting. So what happens if you are an ancient Greek woman and your doctor comes and says, well, I think your womb has moved up and got stuck on your liver. So what we need to do is we need to tie you up with some string and

things around your waist and sort of shake you a bit and get it down again. What's your best option? Is your best option to say, don't be daft? Or to go, okay, doctor, let's just do that, shall we? Yes, I feel a lot better. Thank you, doctor. Yes, you can go away now. Yes, take the beetle peters out, untie the string. I'm feeling better. I'm feeling much better now. I don't think that we need to do that again. Exactly. It's great. It's just great. Thank you very much. But actually, it's hard to know, isn't it? Why do you go along with the therapy that you think is bonkers? But we still do it today. If a doctor gives you a course of treatment, it takes quite a lot for you be able to say, I don't agree with this, even when we've got Google and they didn't have Google.

Exactly. So we don't, we can't really beat that authority. It's that authority over the body. And being there when you're really weak and pathetic, when you're feeling terrible, you will do anything. Yeah. You know, might sound crazy, but yes, I'll try that. And that's why quack medicine has always done really well too, because anyone who comes along with a theory and says, this has cured loads of people and just do it. If you're that desperate, you will try it. And of course, also, something's get better on their own. Yeah. So you never know for sure if the reason why you feel better is what you did or just would have happened anyway. Bodies are odd like that. So the Greeks, they have, well, they say they come up with a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff,

but they have quite clear understandings of what the male body and the female body is. And the temptation is to look back and think that they understood it as completely binary, that they two entirely separate entities. What's your research shown around that? How did the ancient Greeks understand male, female bodies? That's very interesting, isn't it? Because binaries are so big in ancient Greek philosophy generally. It's all about binaries. Hot, cold, wet, dry, up down, everything, left right. And even with left right, there's a Hippocratic remedy, ancient Greek remedy, which talks about if you want to have a boy, the man must tie up his left testicle because girls come from the left. And he must make sure, ha ha. And he must make sure the seed

lands in the right side of the woman's womb because boys come from the right. Now, by the time you've done this, you've probably gone off the whole thing anyway. Let's just please, just stop bother tonight. So that's interesting. It's got left right and male, female, all tied up together there, tied up literally, I'm afraid. So yeah, yeah, the left right, hot, cold, wet, dry, all that stuff gets built into the boy girl stuff. But the big thing that the big thing that, ancient Greek medicine says about women is that women's bodies are completely different. Not that women are like men in many aspects, but they have some other bits which men don't. It's not that. It's that every single inch of your flesh is different if you're a woman. It is spongier and

more absorbent. And they'll talk about how if an experiment, sort of, it's a thought experiment. I don't think anyone actually did it. I think they're thinking, if we were to do this, this would happen. So you get some tightly woven. cloth and some raw basic sheepskin. So sort of cultivated and raw, if you like, and you put them both in a place which is damp. And then after a few days, you take them up and you squeeze them to see which one has taken in more fluid. And the answer is it will be the sheepskin, which is raw and uncultured, not the cloth

which has been woven and sort of set apart. And women are like sheepskin. They're quite specific about that. Wow. So there's even diseases where they suggest you have a lamb's skin over your tummy to sort of absorb the fluid out of your body as a woman. So women's flesh is really different. It's like men and women are different species then, not that they are one and the same and a bit

different. Yes. And it's interesting you say species because the myth of Pandora, the first woman, talks about how she is the origin of the race of women. It's like women are a different racial group. And I know you can push that too far. But there is something there about separation and about difference. So they're very big on difference.

There are some Greek texts that seem to suggest women are failed imitations of men. Like their bodies are attempting, trying very hard to be men, but they just didn't quite make it. Yeah, so that's Aristotle on women as deformed or mutilated men, both of which are really loaded words for us. I mean, really are. They really are. Cheers, Aristotle. It's lovely, isn't it? And I think in the original Greek, it is less horrible than it sounds in English. But it's the idea, again, that men are the basic form. And women are an adjustment of that. So women are like a late arrival with Pandora or, of course, in Christian thought with Eve. Women are late. Women are different. Women are separate. Women are not as good as in lots of key ways for ancient medicine and more modern medicine. Yeah. It's crazy. And it's just like the doctors would think that you were an entirely different species. They did have a lot of interest in what we'd now call intersex, but they called homaphroditism. I think homophroditism was a very specific thing in the ancient Greeks because it came from the god, homaphrodite. Am I right?

thinking that was an actual mythological character? Yeah, he's an actual mythological character, which they're an actual mythological character. How do we know how to, how to give pronouns to hermaphroditus, who merges men and female, and that's where Hamaphroditus is actually someone who fell in love with a girl who wanted to be completely united with them. And, you know, you might think sexually united, but it went a bit too far because God's like that when they when they're having a bad day, and ended up merging the two into one body. Wow. So, yeah, that's a real merger. And you're right, that's a different thing in a sense to the idea of people, ordinary people having characteristics of both sexes. The ancient medical thought, both for the Greeks and the Romans,

suggested that you could move between female and male, but only one way. You could become male, because male is perfect, right? Yeah. Males, the form. So everything moves towards perfection. Yeah. So a girl could become a boy. And we would say probably that that was the revealing of her true sex, rather than this person had been a girl and is now a boy. You can say, well, actually, they were male all the time, but hadn't realised or something. So this often happens on your wedding night. Well, often.

It's not a common thing. But when it does happen, the stories are about it happening on the girls' wedding night. Okay. So it's a moment of transition. And suddenly, whoop, penis and testicles pop out. I hate it when that happens. So we get this sense that the ancient Greeks thought of women either as sort of failed men or at least a completely different species,

use a different race. But we now have a much more nuanced understanding, thank God, and we understand that there are a hell of a lot of overlap with these things, even physical things. Take, for example, breasts. It's very easy to say, boobs are a girl thing, but boys have boobs too. I've seen them on boys. I definitely have. So how did the ancient Greeks understand breasts? Well, breasts are really the most complicated organs of all, I think, because they're visible. So we can all think about breasts. And we can think about showing them, you know, clothing that demonstrates them or hides them. The quite interesting way of playing with your gender identity, actually. So breasts are fundamental because of breast milk. So they are the nurturing

organ without them. We'd all die. Certainly before substitutes were invented and animal milk can be used on humans, but depends on the animal and all sorts of issues there. But Greeks were big on breast milk, but at the same time, they didn't really approve of the things we like about breast milk. So the colostrum, the breast milk that's produced at the very early stages, we know it's very important to the baby's immune system. The ancient Greeks thought that was disgusting and horrible, and you shouldn't take that. You should take breast milk from someone who's already feeding another baby and has got to the sort of milk stage rather than a more sort of thick clostrum stage. Wow.

But you should never give a baby. It's mother's milk when it's just been born because that would just kill it off. It's sort of like clotted milk, they thought. So, you know, they're big on breast milk, but not necessarily in the way that we would think would be a good way to be big on breast milk. Did they have an understanding that personality traits can be transmitted through breast milk? because I've seen that cropping up in the middle ages sometimes. Yes, absolutely right. So personality traits, and that's why animal milk becomes a bit of an issue, because if you were to give someone the milk of donkey, right,

donkey is sort of quite slow, thoughtful plodding. Would that make for a thoughtful plodding sort of child if you gave a child the milk of a wild animal? Would that make the child wild? So they were quite hot on the idea that you transmit characteristics. But also you can translate it in later thought, in European history, you translate, you transmit things like your religious affiliation through the breast milk. You want to have, if you're going to have your breast milk, not from your mother, but from a wet nurse, and that's another entire section, really, if it's from a wet nurse,

you need one of the same religious affiliation as you. So you don't want Roman Catholic breast milk and Protestant breast milk getting mixed up. The characteristics go through, including religion. Did the edge of Greeks think boobs were sexy? Because we take it for granted now that boobs are like these huge sexual indicators and we all, you know, a good rack is very sexy. But the actual fetishization of boobs is not universal at all. So what are the Greeks, were they sexy to Greeks? I think they like them small. It's the impression we get here. But then, you know, also penises are small on statues. All these things are quite small. Yeah, what is that? Can we sidetrack into why do they love a small willy? Because I get asked that all the time and I'm not actually sure.

your money, Helen, what is the little willies on statues about? For my money, it's to do with how the ideal boy lover is actually, you know, the boy, the young boy. It's that thing about ancient Greeks and sexuality as being not in that as defined binary as we think of so that it's okay to have a young boy lover when you're sort of young man and then the young boy will grow up and get facial hair and you'll move on to someone else, but you'll also then move on to a wife to have children with. So I think there's quite a lot of mixed up stuff going on there between attractive boys and attractive girls. I've never heard that before, but now you say that that actually makes perfect sense. No, no,

that I think that that's fascinating because they do have a thing about young boys, but the boy has to be, he's basically a standing for a woman, isn't he? He's a proxy female, which is why he's clean-shaven, very young, and I suppose having a tiny willie. Yeah. And there's also weird things there, weird from my point of view, that you're also somehow educating this boy lover. You're helping him to become a proper man, and that includes having sex with him.

Although, again, whether that's penetration, or whether it's between the thighs or what. There's another whole long debate about that one. It is, isn't there? We should go back to boobs, I suppose. when I've read about them in Greek literature, there's a lot of apple comparisons. And that seems to go right through to the Renaissance, describing them as apples. What is it about apples? Are they just a handy simile?

Well, it gives you some idea of what the ideal size would be, doesn't it? I suppose it does. Actually, and it's sort of graspable, not floppy, sort of quite rounded. And also, I do worry about apples from time to time, because in Christian mythology, of course, we've got the story of Eve. and we've got the fruit which becomes an apple. And then in the Renaissance, we have lots of images of Adam and Eve and the tree and the serpent. And obviously, Eve hasn't got anything on her clothes-wise because they haven't yet decided they're naked and they need to wear clothes. So, hey, we get to see breasts.

That's exciting. One way of seeing breasts is to look at pictures of Eve. But there's images in which it's almost like her breast is being offered to the viewer. You know, Adam's got his hand around her breast. you're thinking breast somehow sexuality is sexuality, why the fall from the Garden of Eden has happened. Apples thing, it's, well, I think it's basically size. Size and firmness, I suppose. Size and firmness, which again is youth. Yes, it is, isn't it? It is mine more like apple, most baked apples, really.

I'd be useless in ancient Greece. Let's move on to one of my favourite historical subjects, the history of the clitoris. Oh, yeah. This is fascinating. Most, for many reasons, but I think because we still don't know an awful lot about the clitoris today, it's still being written about research, people trying to work out what it is. What did the ancient Greeks understand the clitoris to be? And what did they write about it?

So the ancient Greeks were definitely aware of the clitoris. There's not a sort of massive discussion about its use in sexuality, but there are enough references to things where you think that's a clitoris. So myrtleberry is a good one. The Myrtleberry. So thinking small and berry-like and sweet and it's good. There's a famous poem, fragment of a poem by Sappho and that's 6th century BCE in which she talks about the little red apple at the top of the tree and the men, ooh, the men who are taking down the apples from the tree can't quite reach it. Still there. And you think, There's something there about how men haven't really got female sexuality.

And Sappho, yeah, she knows where that apple is. So it's apples again. Apples again and men not being able to find them. So I love the fact it's called a myrtleberry. When people are writing about it, what kind of things are they writing about? I mean, is it in medical literature? Sappho seems to be, that's a brilliant shade she's got there at the men. But what are the medical profession have to say about this?

They're mentioning it in a sort of reasonably casual way. They're not getting into it in big detail. They're aware that there is something there. But they're not dwelling on it. It's just like everybody knows. So I don't think it's at all sort of taboo or hidden. It's just it's there. It's only when you get to the 16th century that you start getting these very odd claims

that someone has discovered it like no one knew it was there before. Well, trust me, they did know it was there before. They weren't talking about it much, but they weren't fussed about it. But they knew it was there. But then you get Colombo in the 16th century saying, I have found this strange little rectangle on women. And if you touch it, even with the tip of your little finger, women go wild.

And they send out seed in all directions. So there's a female ejaculation moment possibly happening there. And it's, wow, it's amazing. And other anatomists, because, Colombo was an anatomist. Other anatomists are saying, well, I've had a look and I can't find it. Okay. There's that subtext, isn't there?

If he can find it and it's just his little finger, will send a woman wild. That's a sort of male control of women thing. But it's also, if his little finger will do it, why won't her little finger do it? I'm back with Helen after this short break. Is it that he discovered, because I think it's really funny. It's like possibly the most amazing act of mansplaining. in the whole human history is to discover, is to discover the clitoris. But if we're trying to be generous, like what is it that he found? Did he find it like, that it was an organ that they

didn't know existed before? Is it, like, had he done anything different at all? Or was he genuinely just going, oh my God? Well, you wonder what he's doing down there anyway, actually. I do. Yes, I do. Did he discover this in the course of a medical experience or a sort of sexual experience? Like, oh, gosh, what was that? Because he was an anatomist, so maybe he was dissecting somebody? Well, this is a living woman. Interesting. That's a good point.

Yeah, this is a living woman. That's what's so bizarre, because other people in his day, other anatomists, were looking for it, but they were looking for it in dead women. So this is what anatomy is all about, really. Dissection, finding stuff.

But with Colombo, it's a living woman. But other people like the great Vesalius, the greatest anatomist at the 16th century, he said he's found a few, you know, but it was just, he called it a sport of nature, meaning not sport as in sort of jolly good fun, but sport as in a sort of one-off thing,

some little quirk of nature. Some women had this funny thing, a bit like an extra finger or something. And it wasn't normal. It wasn't normal at all. So you've got people saying it's there, but it's not normal. We're not sure what it is.

And when you do say, it does turn up in some ancient text. And the thing that I've noticed, and maybe it's just what I'm reading, but they seem to have a real thing about a large clitoris that's going to turn into a penis and then the woman's going to become a deranged lesbian lunatic. Yep, absolutely.

And the amount that this crops up, not just an ancient text, but right through because the medieval people are just going on about repeating the Greeks, and you're thinking, this can't be a normal thing. No, and they were sometimes also using that to other people racially. So saying that these enormous clitorises that became penises were more common in people outside the Greek world. So there's a racial dimension going on, which is also interesting and worrying. So yeah, the idea that somehow it is the same thing, a clitoris is a penis.

And there's modern anatomists who talk about how you could just turn the terminology around. And instead of saying the clitoris is a small penis, you can say the penis is a large clitoris. Once you think about it that way round, why favour one side rather than the other? Oh, quite. It's quite weird. But yeah, so the idea is that your overgrown clitoris can be used like a man would use his penis. And there you're starting to talk about sexual role reversals, which we've seen as very dangerous. The whole world could turn upside down rapidly if you have something like that going on.

There's some really nasty descriptions of a clitorectomy that got Surenus, which is the most amazing name for anyone talking about gynecology, Soranus. But he has a rather nasty description of clipping back one of these elongated clitorises. Yeah. So again, you're not quite sure what he is clipping back there, whether he's talking about slightly longer labia or whether he really has got a clitoris there. But yeah, the idea of a surgical operation to remove one that's too large was there in the ancient world. So, A, what counts as too large?

And B, does that mean they were removing anyone else's clitoris? Because one thing to say, well, yours is too large. It's somehow making you into a man or getting in the way or something. But it's another thing to say, well, actually all clitoris are really bad and we should have the whole lot removed. And that's a later medical development. The poor clitoris is it's been so misunderstood and abused, and that's when they can actually find the fucking thing. Like Freud, Freud had a lot to say about the clitoris, didn't he, when he was presumably on one of his cocaine-fueled rants. But what did Freud have to say about the clitoris?

Because it's not a million miles away from the Greeks. No, it's immature. Sexuality. You know, yes, of course they're quite fun, but that's not real sex. Real sexual pleasure because then you come from penis, impurgi. Of course it can. Of course. And so you have a rather unfortunate example of Princess Marie Bonaparte, who was a friend of Freud's, who ended up having her clitoris moved because she thought her whole problem with heterosexual sex was that her clitoris was too far away from her vagina. So she could never manage this sort of perfect Freudian sex where it all came together. So she thought the answer was to move the clitoris, which seems like going a little bit too far. Oh, do you still get this kind of ballics about a clitoral and a vaginal orgasm? That still is doing the rounds today. People still talk about that.

And it's not true, is it? No. What they discovered in, was it the 80s or the 90s, when they finally got the full size of the clitoris, is that the mysterious G-spot is actually the clitoral roots going down the anterior vaginal wall? It's all connected. The clitoris wraps around, the inner bits of the clitoris wrap around the vagina so that you can't separate one from the other. There is no G spot. It's the C spot. It always has been. It always has been. But again, you know, we like the, we like the, oh, now we've finally found the answer. Oh, there's a G spot. Actually, no, it's much more complicated. And simple. It is. And simple, really. It blows my mind that, like, we're still discovering that, was it 2,0005 when the urologist Helen O'Connell actually found that, was it the full shape of it? Yes. Yes. And now you can buy those in sort of plush models of the clitoris. You have little clitorial necklaces and all sorts of things. And people still thought, you're still thought, what is. Is that thing?

Well, actually... It looks like a goose, I think. It does. It does. It's quite a strong neck, hasn't it? But so there's arguments that the extent of the clitoris, the underground extent of the clitoris, if you like, makes it bigger than the penis. It's got more nerve endings than the penis.

Oh, I love that. So I'm not saying size is everything, but, you know, just mention that. No, but I would quite like to have a bigger clitorist than a man. I would quite like that for Freudian reasons. We should talk about another made-up nonsense that was really important to the Greeks, which is the hymen. Or maybe it wasn't important to them. What do they have to say about the hymen?

Exactly. Well, they're big on bleeding at first intercourse, but that doesn't mean you're big on the hymen. Because Serranus, yes, him again. I'm trying to say Serranes, not sorenas, but that's only because I'm trying hard not to giggle. I know it's pathetic, isn't it? We really are pathetic.

But anyway, him, the big S. Yes. We can be proper historians. We'll be proper historians. We'll call him the big S. So the big S says that he's not a, convinced that there is such a thing as a hymen, which suggests someone thought there was, but he was otherwise who you're arguing with. He's not at all convinced because you can insert a vaginal

probe, so small metal thing, into a virgin. So if there was a hymen, it would get stuck, wouldn't it? And virgins have periods, so it can't be anything there stopping them. So therefore no such thing. Now, what do you do with that? Obviously, he's arguing with someone who says there is a hymen, but his line is there isn't a hymen. But if there is any bleeding at first intercourse, it's because, he says, the vagina is sort of ribbed and bits of it will get sore. And also, if you think about marriage in the ancient Greek and Roman world, the ideal, I'm not saying it always happened, the ideal was for a girl to be married very soon after her first period. So we're talking maybe 13, 14 year old with a much older man who probably doesn't know what he's doing.

It's not at all surprising that some of these women would have bled, but doesn't mean Hyman. Hyman's come in much later. And again, it's back to the 16th century anatomists and the things these guys were doing, busy looking for clitoris is, but also looking for hymons. And they weren't, again, they weren't convinced. Some of them said, oh, yeah, definitely there's a membrane

in all virgins, and it's broken at first intercourse. And others were saying, well, I've had a look, I can't find it. Is it true, Helen? What is a hymen? Is it like a vacuum-packed seal for a vagina? Is it like a Tupperware lid that you have to take off? Does it even exist? I think where we are now on this is that it doesn't have to exist.

There might be one. You don't have to have one. And just because nothing ever bled doesn't prove a thing. There have always been stories about how you mustn't do horse riding or bicycle riding or whatever was the thing of your particular era because it might break your hymen. It's so fragile. You mustn't use tampons if you're a virgin because you'll break your hymen. It's all really obsessive because who wants to sit there and go, look, I'm a real virgin. I had a hymen.

what is this proving? What is this proving to anyone? It proves nothing because you can have an intact hymen and have still had sex and you can have not had sex and have a broken hymen and they still today have virginity tests around the world. Yes. The World Health Organization is campaigning against it. And I believe what they're checking for is a hymen and it's a nonsense. You cannot tell someone's sexual status by this. Absolutely not. And even as in the ancient world, you had people saying well the problem with hymen testing, you know, this idea there is a virgin sign somewhere, was that if there is one, as soon as you put your finger into test for it, you break it. So what's the point of that?

The test actually breaks the thing you're looking for. So it's not very scientific. And even in periods of human history where there's been a big Heimann culture, so say 18th, 19th century, there was acknowledgement that some were stretchier than others. and there were some scary stories in the medical literature of women going to the doctor and saying, I don't think this sex thing's really working very well, not getting pregnant, and I really don't understand any of this. And the doctor having an examination and finding they had an unbroken, extra thick hymen. And their husbands have been busy putting it in the wrong hole because there's no way they could have got it in there.

Wow. So it's horrendous when you think about the things that have happened to women as a result of these myths. But some women will have a very strong membrane there. And there is a thing called imperforate hymen where it doesn't break. And you have to have it broken surgically. And that's really dangerous because you could have started your periods, but nothing can get out. So you get a buildup of assorted blood and various unpleasant things happen. You don't want to go into graphic detail. My book does, but not for your tender audience. Okay.

So unpleasant yuck can come out. But that's really rare. It's not, oh gosh, everyone's got a hymen and it doesn't break until you have sex. It's some people have a membrane there that is hard to break and some people don't. Back with Helen after this short break. About hymonds and the obsession about this, like, and it is a nonsense, but the obsession about if we'll check it to see if there's been penetration, we can check, we can prove it, is symptomatic of an incredibly,

what would be called a heteronormative culture, Because it's only checking if a willy's been in there. That's the only type of say it's not checking for cunolingus. It's not checking for fingering. It's not checking for masturbation. And it's symptomatic of a really entrenched view that only penetrative sex actually counts as proper sex. Yes, it is because no such thing as a lesbian hymen. Right, exactly.

And no one's checking boys. Or are they? Or is anyone checking boys? If you go online, you will find, is there a male hymen? is a genuine question people apparently ask. And they get all excited about this. It's the frenulum, allegedly. And it's got nothing to do with sex at all again.

But it's almost like men want Hyman because women had one. Really? That's all the wrong way round, isn't it? It is. We should talk about the womb because that's a big one all throughout. It's still, today when you think, as this time of recording it, the Olympics are just coming to an end and there's been all kinds of controversy

about the Bucks at Imakhalif. And from my understanding, she has a vagina, she has a cervix, she's always been a woman, she was born and raised a woman, but has an elevated testosterone level. And we're still rowing about what are the physical markers of womanhood today. Womb is a big one, isn't it? So what did the ancient Greeks, what did they have to say about a womb?

So wombs really are definitive for ancient Greeks. If you've had children, that proves you've got a womb. That's really the only way you can prove it. It's because you can't. It's not. You can't go in and check. So before you can do scans and things, it's if you've had children, you're definitely a woman. So even if something happens, and there's a medical case history from the 4th century BCE in the Hippocratic text called epidemics, where a woman called Phi Thusa starts growing a beard and her voice deepens. And this is after her husband has gone away. He might have been exiled. He might have been exiled. He might just left her, the Greek is a bit vague. And so she has no man and she's previously given birth.

And all this is starting to happen to her. And the medical explanation that's given then is that perhaps what's been going on is that her being a woman was somehow anchored by having a man to give her babies. And once he's not there, her femininity just sort of starts to drift off. You can see the weird logic that they're coming up with though. There is always weird. It's logic. That's the thing. There's always logic. Somewhere there's method in the madness. Absolutely that. Exactly that. So therefore, it's interesting to see how she's described.

Is she she or is she he once the beard grows? And the answer is she's still she because she's had babies before. So we know there's a womb. It's the womb that actually defines her. And the womb is seen as a really bizarre and interesting organ by ancient Greek and Roman medicine. So it's miraculous. It's got extraordinary powers. You know, it can create a baby inside it from menstrual blood and semen.

And it can hold that baby securely and it can push that baby out at the right time, having held it in for the right length of time. And it can expel blood, but it can also expel other substances from the body through the blood. So anything dodgy, we're talking things like phlegm and bile and black bile, four humors, can also build up and come out with the blood. So it's a really good health-giving organ. It gives women a health advantage even because they've got an extra place to lose fluid from their body. Really exciting.

At the same time, it's a sewer which is, to us sounds hideous. Although, of course, it's better than not having a sewer, right? Yes, yeah. Suors are important. They're important things. Sewers are important, yes. Let's talk civil engineering here. Sewers count.

So it's really good to have a sewer. But because it's in between where you pee and where you poo, it sort of goes in that whole excretory area, which again kind of freaks out people. I see, ooh, it must be excrement. So, wombs are powerful and amazing and miraculous and they're sewers, and they're expelling bad stuff. That's a lot of things for a womb to do. And of course, they're moving, as we talked about last time. We should talk about that again, though, because the wandering womb, that can sound like one of those historical hoaxes that sometimes crops up,

that when you actually look into, you go, no, they didn't think that. Yes, they did. Yes, they did. What is the wandering womb? Okay, wandering womb. So, because your womb is filling up all the way through the month with blood, because of your soft spongy flesh, which absorbs fluid from your diet, it all has to go to your womb and come out.

But wombs have a bit of a mind of their own in ancient medicine, and they might decide to swivel. So if they swivel, then instead of the blood going down, the blood goes up. So vomiting blood becomes a diverted medicine. menstrual period. Yeah. And we think that's weird, but then even in the 19th century, they believed that, and that's obviously post-discovery of the circulation of the blood, in the 19th century, they believe that blood could whoosh up to almost anyway, so bleeding from your ears could be a suppressed menstrual period. Wow. And so even then, there's the idea that even if the womb

isn't actually moving, the blood from it can go pouring out in all directions. And wombs are like, well, they're like lots of things. They're like a dog. They're like. They're like a dog. There's an ancient Greek medical spell, which talks about the womb being like a dog gnawing its way through the body. There's an image of the womb as an octopus, which is quite odd. And so octopus is often used in medical remedies in the ancient world. To help you get pregnant, you need to eat more octopus. And the octopus is because of the suckers on the octopus's legs. The womb is seen as having suckers, which somehow keep it in place or don't keep it in place if it starts to move.

because it can move around the body. It's like an octopus, suckers, that's how it kind of propels itself. Clinging on its way. Yes, yes. This is amazing. It is extraordinary. It's also got a mouth like a kitten. Right.

So the cervix is like a kitten, all like the mouth of a fish. Right. A lot of animal imagery around wounds. Really big. I have read in a couple of Greek texts of them describing the womb, not likening it to an animal. saying it's an animal. Yes. So that's Plato. That's the one. Yes. Plato, memorably, and of course, because it's Plato, people do remember, memorably says that the womb is basically an animal in search of moisture and in search of having offspring. It wants to have babies. Wombs just want to get pregnant.

That's their aim in life. And if they can't do it, you know, they'll start getting desperate. And the reason why they whiz up the body, they like to get moist because in ancient Greek medicine, and one of the places they go to is the liver, and the liver is obviously a bloody organ. And they want more blood to make babies with, really. So, yeah, they're quite sentient. But they're sort of sentient and they're not. So some of the texts make it very animal.

Others are much more about the sort of mechanical thing, like it's full and so it moves in this direction or that direction. It sounds bonkers. I guess it made sense to them at the time. As these things tend to do when you trace back why they thought this, you can kind of go, oh, okay, like you missed a couple of building blocks with this idea, but I can see what you were doing. But the wandering womb theory took a remarkably long time to shake off, didn't it?

Yes, it did. It's like we want to believe that women have this extra thing in their bodies, which clearly is weird because men don't have one, right? Everything else you can say, well, clitoris, it's like a small penis. Or you can say breasts, yes, you know, men have breasts too, there's tissue, just as bigger in women, maybe. all those things, but womb's no, no analog. In the 19th century, they were quite big on trying to make tables of analogies

between men's bits and women's bits. They always got stuck with the womb. What is it? Is it prostate? Can't be. Is it scrotum? Not really. It doesn't really match up with anything.

So it is always that organ that needs explaining. Yeah. And even when they've finally gone, all right, lads, I'm sorry to have to tell everybody about this, but the womb doesn't actually look like. like an octopus and wandered around the body. You still get this leftover legacy of all women's problems are somehow tied to the womb in one way or another. Absolutely.

Whether you're going to do that in terms of it's all to do with periods or it's all to do with the womb. Hysteria. But then they're the same thing, right? Yeah, hysteria. So hysteria, ancient Greek word, meaning later or lower in the body, becomes eventually hysteria as it's all about the world. womb. And you used to have the concept of male hysteria at one point. So men could have this too.

And then because it doesn't really work because men don't have wounds, that becomes shell shock, which sounds nice and manly, good, hard consonant there, shock. So they stopped calling it male hysteria and called it shell shock in the First World War. I mean, the Victorians, they loved all of this. Let's link everything that's wrong with a woman to her emotional well-being, which is then traced back to the womb in one way or another because it's all about her reproductive system and her reproductive organs. And I still think that we're doing it today. I can still see legacies in it. Yes, no one on the NHS is going to tell you that the womb has gone wandering. But we still have that association of women are more emotional, more liable to some kind of

hysterical derangement. And that all goes right back to the Greeks. Yes. And the only way you're going to anchor that womb is by putting a baby in it. And that's going to stop it from wandering around the place and that's going to keep it where it should be. It's women in their place and the womb in their place. Keep the womb in its place. Helen, you have been wonderful to talk to you always are. But my final question is so the book that you've written is about looking at how the body has been understood in various contexts. And one of the things I think is really interesting is you're very keen to dismantle this idea of, well, they did that then and kind of weren't this so silly and we're not doing that now.

How big is the influence you think that Greek medical texts have today? Do you think that we're still doing this stuff? I think we are still doing that. It doesn't help that we've still got this image of Hippocrates as the great doctor, and Hippocrates said this, hypocrite's said that, even though usually none of the texts associated with his name say anything of the kind. We still have this thing about the ancient Greeks even now, through the person of Hippocrates.

And I think we are very keen to say that women's bodies are different from men's in a way that makes them problematic, not different from men's, and therefore we need to think about how that works. We've still got the idea that the 70 kilogram male is the norm for things like drug tests. We're still not looking at women's bodies properly there. We don't take women's pain seriously. Plenty of evidence of that. There's still a lot of discrimination against women in medicine. and it does go back to the Greeks.

Didn't you tell me that Hippocrates doesn't actually exist? That's right. Well, I mean, there was a doctor called Hippocrates, but whether he wrote any of the things that we have that have been associated with his name, that's debatable. Helen, you have been marvellous to talk to you. Thank you so much. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

They can find me on my Open University website where I've got all sorts of exciting details. I've got a blog called Mistaking Histories. And of course they've got the book, Immaculate Forms, uncovering the history of the female body, which is coming out on September 5th. Amazing. And we hope to have you back very soon to talk about more mad, mad Greek people and what they thought about vagas. Time flies when we're having fun, doesn't it?

Lovely to see you. Thank you for listening. And thanks to Helen for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is, you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hi, you can email us at betwixt at a history hit.com.

We've got episodes on everything from pagan ritual nudity to ancient goddesses, all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagi and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The Senior Producer was Charlotte Long. 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.