Oh What A Time... - #180 A History of Female Pleasure with Dr Kate Lister (Part 2)

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!**THIS EPISODE CONTAINS STRONG LANGUAGE AND THEMES OF AN ADULT NATURE**Our guest this week is British historian and author Dr Kate Lister who is here to discuss her new book ‘Flick’ which explores female pleasure throughout history; from Ancient Mesopotamian sex goddesses to the contraceptive pill.The book itself is fascinating and you can get it here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/463104/flick-by-lister-dr-kate/9780857506436Elsewhere, our inbox this week has been rocked by the news that there are venomous sharks in the Thames! Can you blow our minds with any facts like that one? Please attempt it: [e-mail] from now on Part 1 is released on Monday and Part 2 on Wednesday - but if you want more Oh What A Time and both parts at once, you should sign up for our Patreon! On there you’ll now find:•The full archive of bonus episodes•Brand new bonus episodes each month•OWAT subscriber group chats•Loads of extra perks for supporters of the show•PLUS ad-free episodes earlier than everyone elseJoin us at 👉 patreon.com/ohwhatatimeAnd as a special thank you for joining, use the code CUSTARD for 25% off your first month.You can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom x Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Hello and welcome to part two of Flick, a history of female pleasure with Dr Kate Lister. This episode in particular has themes of asexual nature and also has the strongest language imaginable. Let's get on with the show. So talking about that period moving through the 17th century, another thing that I've stuck out with the Anania pamphlets, am I pronouncing that right or is that wrong? The wanky ones. Onanism. Yes. Yes. So, yes. And how that's kind of impacted shame around sex in Britain.

So do you want to explain this? Because they was widespread, weren't they? And lots of people would have encountered them. It was a strange thing that happened. It's like, I mean, it's the oldest drift in the world, isn't it? Is you invent an illness and then you peddle the cure for it. So what we get in the 18th century is this new paranoia about what is called onanism or self-pollution. It's basically masturbating. It was equally applied to men and women, although men really, really did have some nafti cures on offer for you guys.

So it was this idea that if you lost... What were those cures? What were the cures for... I'll get to them. Not that I need them just to be clear. No, no. So you get this idea that if you lose too much seminal fluid, that your body will become weakened.

That was a big one. And it kind of makes a weird kind of sense if you think about how do you feel immediately after you've orgasmed, probably a little bit like, oh, and I'm done, yeah? Like the French call it La Petitimo, the Little Death. So they kind of extrapolate from that, this idea that if you lose too much seminal fluid, your health is going to be damaged. And women don't have seminal fluid, but they still applied it to them as well.

No wanking for anybody. And they start to publish all these really mad tracts and pamphlets, like showing basically that masturbation can be terminal, that you'll go. If you've ever heard that you'll go blind, if you masturbated, that's thanks to this. Madness. Oh, is it?

Yeah. And by the time it gets the 19th century, this idea is entrenched that masturbation is really, really bad for your health. It is primarily aimed at men, actually, but women as well. Women were just thought to be hysterical, lunatics, nymphomaniacs,

and extreme things that could be done to cure women, included clitorectomies and cutting out the ovaries. In the most extreme cases, that wasn't done very often, but it was done. And for men, it was, You can see these things in the Welcome Trust. They're called spermataria rings.

Google them at your peril. And it's basically a ring with teeth, jagged teeth on the inside. And you'd put that around the penis at night to stop any nocturnal emissions. And also what was called hygienic circumcision. So that's circumcision purely for the purpose to stop the child masturbating when they get older. And that is one of the reasons why circumcision is still so widespread in America today. because it really, really took off there. Wow.

Yeah, it was an anti-masturbation tactic. So these pamphlets, who is writing them? Who are the people that are writing these pamphys? They start off being written by anonymous quacks, basically. And they're kind of like, think of them as like an 18th century internet forum of just like, oh my God, somebody said, but you know how powerful those things can be. Yeah.

But then we've got a guy called Tiso, who, he is a doctor, and he writes a book called Onanism in, I think it was the late 18th century, and now it's got like a doctor's stamp of approval on it. Now it's become a medical issue. So it starts off just like bullshit, ways to shame people and try and sell cures and panic people. And then it enters actual mainstream medical discourse as sex is bad, masturbation is bad, too much sex,

that if women do this too much, they'll turn into, quote, quote, nymphomaniacs. Nymphomania became a classified condition. the time. Because Ornan is a character in the Bible, is he? Yeah, yeah. He wastes his seed on the floor. He's supposed to have masturbated. That's where it comes from.

If I could broad brush some of this history, it felt like in antiquity there was a lot more sexual freedom. And then obviously in the Middle Ages, religion takes a firm hold of society. And it felt like that kind of prudishness had a grip on society until about the 1960s. Throughout this period, as we're talking, the 16th, 17, 18th century, it just felt like that was almost a hangover of the Middle Ages, almost.

I think that, yeah, there's a lot of truth to that. I think that we need to be careful about, I know that a lot of people like to look at the ancient world and go, we had it all figured out then. Like, it was great to be gay and, you know, everyone was sexually freedom. It wasn't like that, is they had their own hang-ups, and they did, you know, there's a lot of nasty stuff that was going on there, too. But they didn't have this idea of sexual pleasure is wrong.

That comes in with Christianity. And we've been living in the shadow of that for a very, very, very long time. It is easy to tie it to religion, but I kind of think that if it hadn't been religion, it might have been something else. Well, at one point you tie it quite strongly to the middle class, actually. There's a point when you talk about the 17th century, the middle class had got quite a lot to answer for. They do.

They've got a great way of ruining stuff. That's sort of the argument. And this is something that historians and certainly linguists have pointed out, is that by the time you get to the early modern period, capitalism is developing, basically. You've always had people at the bottom and people at the tops. There's always been a middle bit,

but it starts to expand considerably. You get traders and you get merchants and you get people starting to stand up on the room. They're starting to challenge the aristocracy just a little bit. But what you also get is an establishment of middle-class morality. And it becomes very important to them because they can't be materially better than the aristocrats, but they can be morally better than the aristocrats.

And we still have middle-class morality is still very, very powerful in guiding social norms. We still do it today. Yeah. So how is that manifesting itself at that point then? What did they not like about their aristocracy and how sort of hard line were they with their opinions? Well, one of the things you start to get around this time.

So this is like the 17th century is you get these anti-vice groups cropping up all over the place. And they're called things like in Britain, they were called the Society for the Reformation of Manners. And you get basically anti-vice squads. And you get them cropping up in Germany and you get them cropping up in France. The formerly fun-loving Sun King suddenly starts panicking about everyone's sexual morals and passing loads of laws, about if you commit adultery, you're going to go to jail and you get people clamping down on this.

The Society for the Reformation of Manners, who are assholes, they weren't quite the police. But they sort of held that level of power. They would do things like... Community support officer, those sort of people? Yeah, yes. Like think like local Facebook community group with power And then you're kind of getting somewhere close to it They would do things like they'd organise raids

Where the new gay people were socialising They would organise raids on brothels They would prosecute arrest people Put people in the stocks They would just really, really hammered it home And then like we get the Puritans Who come in who are very much Pleasure isn't good

Pleasure itself is a thing And that's quite an important the differentiation between what had gone before the advent of Christianity is the idea that pleasure is bad. And the Victorians, I'd always thought that the Victorians were more prudish than the generations that had come before them. No, they're a weird bunch of Victorians. Yeah.

That's what I always thought. I thought it was like, you know, a black and white photo of an ankle that would be people goodbye. That was my impression of the Victorians, just sort of, they couldn't believe they were seeing the heel of a foot or whatever. That, again, is that middle-class. class morality. You get that and that is big in the Victorian period and you get this out because the thing is, there's never one narrative. There's multiple, there's multiple outlooks. Like,

just like today, there are some people who think sex is great. There's some people who think that it should all be punished and suppressed. So the Victorians do a lot of that. But one of the things that they do is they have this outward condemnation of sexual excess. So you do get things like, you know, they get upset about the word trousers and they love a good sex scandal and they, you know, they do worry about things being too sexual and scandalous. But also these are the people that invented pornographic photographs and pornographic film. And they, because you can't repress sexuality.

And what they did is they turned it into a discourse. So they obsess about sexuality. They obsess about it medically, legally. They're thinking about it all the time, scientifically. What is sex? So they're talking about it all the time. But they're never actually saying, and let's just have sex and get it over with.

It would be a lot quicker. I've got quite nice, ankles. I've always thought I would have done all right. The Ellis James Victorian ankle calendar. Someone who comes up with the book badly is Freud. And I didn't know an awful lot about Sigma Freud until I read this book. Because he's still, I think, he's still so famous and his ideas are so famous. And I didn't realize how damage.

how damaging a lot of them were to women. So would you like to talk to us about that? Freud is really important. He is. He wasn't the only psychotherapist kind of inventing the field, but he's certainly one of the most influential. And nobody had really done it before him.

He was the person that came along and went, maybe there's a subconscious. That's a pretty revolutionary idea. And maybe, you know, talking about things and we can get, talk about your emotions. And he's done so much important work. But he also fucked a lot of things up quite spectacularly. And he did a lot of damage

when it comes to women. So he has one of the many things that he thought was bad was a clitoral orgasm. Yeah. So he has this idea that a woman coming using the clitoris is what he would call sexually immature. That the idea that you had to, only a vaginal orgasm he's talking about is mature.

And we still live with this. You can still find people talking about this today in various online forums, the difference between a vaginal orgasm and a clitoral orgasm. And I've seen tantric groups talking about it as well. And it comes from this, and it wasn't just Freud that was doing it, but he was the most influential. And really what that's doing is it's just saying that you need a penis to orgasm.

It wipes out every other sex act apart from penetration. That seems to be a theme basically throughout history, this pervasive idea that men can't get their head around the idea of sex without a penis. That basically seems they just can't, they're so sure that a penis has to be involved in a sort of and doing exactly what a penis should do, quote, I'm quite not what I mean. It's depressing how that theme just does not abate, does not go away, does it? It doesn't go away and it's still with us. It's depressing when you look at it, but you've realised that it's still enforced. Like, even the way we talk about sex, like, when we say that something's foreplay,

like, what does that mean? That it's a forerunner to the main events, that it's, and we've, like, categorised sex acts into what's real sex. Or, like, when people talk about what losing their virginity means, they mean sticking a willie in something. That's what that means. And you've got, like, people try and find loads of little get-out clauses. I don't really lose my virginity.

We only, you know, got to fourth base, whatever it was. Because we still have this idea that real sex means putting a penis into something. On which, the Greeks and the Romans really were not fans of Cunalingas, you make that clear. And also, that comes up again, doesn't it? Like the 16th and 17th century during the witch trials, it comes up. So this is all part of that story, isn't it? Do you want to talk about that? Yeah.

So Cunalingas is an act that has long been shamed by the patriarchy. And I think that the theory that you can see it, like it's awful when you get to Rome. They sort of, they're so nasty about pussies, which is awful considering how many penises they put on absolutely everything. But they are really vicious. They're easier to draw, though. That's true, actually. That's true. Easier to chisel out of marble.

Viginas are hard. We don't want to do that. And you do get this, like, have you ever been to Pompeii? No, but I'd love to. No, I'd love to go to Pompey. One of the amazing things they've got there is the graffiti that was drawn all over the walls has been preserved. So it seemed like that's their version of social media.

It's just people scrawling endless things. And the insult that you get so much, probably more than any other, is cunt liquor. That's their insult. That's their version of like, motherfucker. Like, the worst thing you can call someone is someone that performs cunolingus. You're a cunt liquor. And it's linked with this. idea that you're not masculine. Because

why would a proper masculine man his penis working? Why would he need to perform cunolingus? Because surely the mighty rod is enough. So there's this idea that the only people performing cunnelingus are men whose penises don't work and lesbians. And that's kind of underpinned a lot of the history of cunolingus. It's amazing, isn't it, that graffiti on a wall can be a historical source when sort of normal source materials were hard to

come by? Well, it's social history. That's the stuff that's difficult to come by. I mean, Pompeii is just an absolute treasure trove for that. And like, what did normal people say? What did they think? How did they talk to one another? What did they think was important? And yeah, that, uh, cunnelingus, they, they weren't have found this. In fact, one of the frescoes that you get in Pompeii, it's in one of the bathhouses. And it's got this woman and she's got a leg splayed. And there's this tiny, tiny, tiny little man just in between her legs, lapping away like a little, And he said that that might have been a sort of like a reminder picture. So if the example you use is sort of like a simple,

oh, I left my towel under the tiny man going down on a one. That's the one. Yeah, it's a good aid to memory of where you've left your toga. But it was obviously like that's a funny image to them. Like look how hilarious it is that a man would do that. Oh my God. Yeah. So let's move forward to sort of more modern times now.

more specifically the time between the wars and the 1920s, okay, because things are starting to change. Would it be fair to describe that as a bit of a sexual revolution or is that a bit rose-tinted? What did it mean for women? How much did, you know, let's talk about that time. Things definitely changed in the 1920s. I mean, historians have like, they've gone back and they've kind of like revised it and they're like, all right, everybody calm down. It wasn't quite, you know, the hedonistic party that we all think it was. But things definitely changed because you can't come through a world war like that when I think it was like between, 15 and 25 million people died rough estimates.

And then the Spanish flu and it was another maybe even 100 million. I might have got that wrong. But so many people have died during this conflict and the flu. I think that would change your attitude to casual sex after that one. I think almost certainly that it shifted an attitude of like, do you know what, let's party. Let's have a bit of a good time here. And of course, the other thing that happened is that women stepped into the workforce

and proved that they could do it. And they weren't, it's not very easy to make them. go back now either. That was a real problem for the authorities. Lots of the men came back and went, well, thanks for doing that for me while I was away. Do you mind step in a side? They're like, nope, nope, I don't want to do that. Nope.

There was actually a piece of legislation, wasn't there, in Britain? I can't remember the name of it, but it's got an incredibly unprogressive name designed to get men back into work. Yeah, it's like women go home law or something, isn't it? It's awful. There was a real move trying to get women back

into the kitchen and you know in some extent well it was quite successful but the other thing that you've got is you've got the movement for contraception that's really starting to get going around this point the the move for what's called family planning reliable forms of birth control that movement is starting to go at this point so things are different in the 1920s that they're very different for women i talk you birth control you talk about how important the pill has been as a thing which completely change women's lives, their relationship with sex and the impact that had on their working lives as well and their lives beyond that, basically.

It's not just you get to have sex and not get pregnant, which is the main thing that the pill did, which in itself is huge. We've never, ever been able to do that before, ever. Methods of birth control, probably the best one that they come up with just the pull-out method. And I think that there was research done that shows that's about 60% proof. I want to told that to my group of students,

I was still teaching and they went, oh really? I didn't. I was like, no, don't do that. No, that's the fucking hell. Don't do that. So the pull-out method, you have rudimentary condoms since probably about the 16th century. They were made of animal guts and designed to be washed out. Washed out and we used. Not sure about that one. Lovely. Oh, is that what it was? It was basically a sock that you'd re-wash out and... It was a sock. It was like a sausage casing and they would be treated and... I like sest, yes. And is that getting passed around the village?

Yeah. Oh my God. I mean, ideally, you shouldn't be passing it around to other people. But we do have records of a brothel that got in that made the records because they were reusing customers' condoms and then passing them on to the next one in the 17th century. So, like, what they would do, so they'd get animal gut casing, which would then obviously go crispy when it had dried because it doesn't stay pliable. so you'd have to soak it in milk or water beforehand

to kind of loosen it up and then you would try and wash it out and sometimes you have to put a bow on the end of it and it's all a bit rubbish because it doesn't work in the evening. I had a very posh bike fit at my local bike shop the other day because I'm buying a new bike and I'd forgotten my cycling shorts and they went, don't worry, there's some in this box

and I had to put them on. I thought, after I was wearing them for half a minute, I thought, are these communal bike shorts? And if so, I really hope. They've been washed. And that was bad enough. But a communal village condom is the worst thing. It's grim.

It's grim. It's grim. It's grim. But then if you're facing syphilis, then maybe you'd give it a whirl. Yeah. Mind you, we've got HIV today and people still don't use condoms today.

So, yeah. And then how did condoms and things like that? How did they develop since that early animal hide option? How quickly do things improve? They were animal hides for a long time. Were they really? And what happened was you got the invention of rubber. That was what happened.

And the early rubber condoms, they really are like sheets and sheet. They're really thick. And they would again be made to be washed out and reused. But it was a guy from Germany, a Jewish guy who was fleeing persecution from the Nazis, who invented the dip rubber method. His name was Frome and even in Germany today, condoms are called Fromes. And he invented that, so like before that you would wrap sheets of rubber. and then he invented the dip

so you'd get like your phallic mould and you'd dip it in the rubber so suddenly you had condoms that were much thinner and easier to use but that was in the 1940s but thanks thanks to that so the pill is that's the 60s 70s that's the time isn't it yeah you start this chapter there's a lovely bit of a poem

from Philip Larkin which is sexual intercourse began in 1963 which is rather late for me between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP which I love there's such a such a great piece of that. How sort of seismic was the change of that? That's probably what most people would have viewed as the great sexual revolution probably.

I think like I speak to my mother and law. She remembers the 60s and the 70, this real time of freedom she'd never experienced before. How impactful was it? And once again, are we looking at it with rose-tinted specs? Was it not really changing things for a lot of people? What's the truth of it? The best way to look at what happened in the 60s

is it wasn't really a revolution. It's more of a continuum of events. The problem is saying it's a revolution kind of gives the idea of like, oh, we've done. Well, there's a hurrah, fixed. We did that and then everything's great. Some people got a sexual revolution. There's no two ways about that. I mean, the pill, a second only maybe to penicillin curing STIs changed sex.

Like nothing had changed sex before. But the problem was that we didn't have social parity. That's the thing. So we have some people, but we didn't have equal rights for people. for gay people, for disabled people, for women, those rights weren't there yet. So not everybody gets to have a sexual revolution. You see a distinct changing in sexual attitudes.

Elvis the pelvis comes along and you get like sex. And of course, like we see more and more TV starts being normalized. So what people see on screen starts to become their normal and we're seeing more sex on TV. And then you've got like suppression campaigns as well. It was definitely changing. Rock and roll did a lot of things. attitudes to sex changed

but we didn't get sexual equality. That's not true. Yeah. So, I mean, what sort of impact do you think people like Elvis do you think it really, they actually did have an impact the way that they had to sexualize themselves the way it made young, yeah. Yes, I mean, you've seen the footage of the girls screaming

at Elvis and screaming at the Beatles. That, I don't even know what that is. It's a mass hysteria. That's just... Yeah, incredible. Yeah. Have you read... Love Me Do of Beatles Progress, which is the book about the first Beatles tour of, or is it, of

the Beatles Tour of 1963. So it was written at the time by a writer called Michael Braun, and he describes the hysteria. And the thing with, I'm really big into the Beatles, right, so I can be a real Beatles bore. But the books that are written now, obviously, 60 years after the event, they can explain the hysteria, but he was right then, he was reported from it first-hand. You'd have girls fainting and weeping and controllably. You know, just screaming. Just screaming. And often, often wetting themselves.

That's the thing. That's what, that's been written out of history a bit. But the ushers would be clean in the seats in cinemas because girls had just wet themselves with excitement. The Beatles had come on stage. And the other thing that we feel like, we look at that footage now and we're like, oh, screaming girls. But that had never happened before.

No. Like that, like the first, like, oh my God, like, what the fuck is going on? People thought that it was a genuine mania. Yeah. And it was just. young girls as well. And I think, like, I've spoken to a few historians in research early sex symbols,

and they kind of argue that people like the Beatles and people like Elvis is they gave women a safe place to project their sexuality, which hadn't been available to them before because it's so heavily policed or it's shamed or the option just isn't there. They can't go down a brothel to sew their wild oats.

So suddenly you've got this, like, there's Elvis shaking his pelvis and just this wave of sexual frustration and emotion comes out of them. Well, Mom was, when the Beatles released their first single, she would have been 10, 10, 11, and she was a huge Beatles fan. Her Paul McCartney was the one she liked,

and her ceiling, this is sort of a normal sort of 60 school girl, sort of in a small town. Her ceiling was covered with pictures of Paul McCartney so she could blow him a kiss at night because she was just, he was just her idol. But I suppose it is a very safe, way of fancying boys. It's a safe way to do it.

It's a safe outlet. But in many ways as well, like they created the teenager. There'd always been young people. There'd always been people in their teens. But the teenager as a distinct category, that was new. And they didn't have to do national service.

They didn't have to do national service. The idea that you are a teenager and that, you know, you can have fun and that kind of stuff. And they didn't remember the war. So they weren't traumatized by the Second World War. Whereas they paid, parents were. Absolutely were. Like, until, really, until the war, is you weren't a teenager.

You were a mini-adult. Like, you'd go and, you know, like, you read to the record, like, people are getting married, like, 17, 18. You know, like, they've got big families by the time of the mid-20s. And suddenly, all that starts to change, that people can do things differently. And that, I mean, it was radical. It was a huge, huge shift. You know, gay sex was legalised in 1967, is it? It was partially decriminalised.

But the fact that they were. talking about it and the fact that it was becoming part of mainstream conversation, that was huge. That was, like, these conversations hadn't happened before. The fact that, you know, women's lib starts to emerge in ways that it hadn't done before. And the economy has improved, so people have been in their top games. You know, these two things are absolutely interlinked. I was talking to a historian the other day called Harry Tapper,

who's a brilliant historian of homophobia and gay history. And he's making the argument that in times of affluence, you get a, relaxing around sexual attitudes. And he links homophobia to times of hardship that when, you know, the economy's in decline, rates of homophobia start to spike. So the fact that the economy, yeah, it's really good. The fact that the economy is so strong

allows these discussions to start to take place. Then we have things like the Profumo affair, one of the first times that we realized, our politicians might tell fibs and have sex. Yeah, yeah. But like that was all part of a mainstream conversation. And the thing is, I don't want it to sound like everyone was on board with this because they weren't. These things were happening, but there was also a fierce pushback of people really panicking about this stuff.

I mean, when they saw those young girls screaming at the Beatles, people thought it was a cult. They thought that they'd lost their minds. They thought that they, you know, they burnt their record. There's an amazing bit in the Hunter Davis book about the Beatles. He was in charge of the Sunday Times gossip column. That was one of his first jobs as a journalist. And he said, until the Beatles came along, the Sunday Times gossip column was about bishops.

And the Beatles came along. It was about the Beatles and the stones of the kinks. See, it did. It did. But it didn't change things fast enough. And we have to remember things like, there were still mother and baby homes in Ireland until 1997 the last one closed.

You said it's the same time that wannabe, released by the Spice Girl. It's a staggering fact that. It's a no. It blows your mind. Well, I mean, this book is a brilliant history of where we've come from the, you know, the stories and the journey. What route does the journey now need to take? What do you hope for the future, to be sorry, as we look at sort of what female pleasure will become? Yeah. How would you like to change the conversation, I suppose? Because this is, it's an amazing piece of work. I mean, we're all doing a lot of good work right now. There's a lot of good work going on to try and dismantle.

old narratives and trying to understand new ways of doing stuff. I get asked a lot, like, what was the period in history when we'd figured it out when everything was great? What was the best, was sexually liberated time? And the answer is our own time right now is the most sexually liberated that we've ever been. And I think that what I would like is, because I don't, I know the book is focused on women,

but I really don't want anyone to think that it's a book where I'm shouting at men, because that's not what I want to happen. But I would like women to start, their own right to pleasure. That's what I would like. I would like, I mean, if you look at like the statistics around something, you know, simple as faking orgasms, like, you know, ask women, you know,

don't confess anything, don't name names. But like, if you've done that, why have you done that? Why? Like, why didn't you feel able to say could use things differently or it's just not going to happen tonight? Like, advocate for your own pleasure. And to try and dismantle this idea that sex starts and ends with a penis going into something, I think is really important, is that that's just one sex act.

And, you know, things like if he's orgasmed and you haven't, then it's not over. It's only half time. Carry on, son, I'm afraid. Can roll your sleeves up. You've still got some work to do here. Tap in your watch and saying it's only half time. Exactly, right?

You know, go and get an orange half and then get back at it. But things like that. Like, I want women to be able to advocate for their own sexual pleasure and to say what they want and not feel. Because I think so many people perform sex. It's like we're having the experience, but we're kind of performing to what we think is expected of us or we're performing because we want things to be a certain way

for the person we're with. And I would really like people to get connected with pleasure. I think because that is a really crucial key. Once we've established sexual rights and sexual parity is the idea of pleasure and the right to pleasure. I think that really gets to the heart of things like consent. of respecting one another, of advocating for yourself

and for your own right to your body and to pleasure and to just have better sex. And then maybe in another 100 years when people are reading about those statistics, it'll be like, yeah, straight women come 100% of the time. It is fucking amazing. So if now's the best time to be a woman in terms of seeking out sexual pleasure,

I wondered if, you know, we've covered thousands of years of history here. Like, what was the worst time for the notion that women didn't enjoy sex in history. Basically, who's the worst? Is it the ancient Greeks? The Romans, the Victorians. No, it's the Victorians.

It's the Victorians. Because they came up with this idea that women don't enjoy sex. That was them that did that. I mean, it's not a completely accepted medical theory. You do get pushed back from it. You get medical texts. People going, I don't think that's quite right.

But they're sort of in the minority. If you read Victorian porn, they absolutely knew that women could enjoy sex. But you get this idea is established that women's sex drive is frail and that it's weak and that you even get one guy, William Ackton, saying that women aren't even troubled by sexual desire. That it's just not something that we're even bothered with, which is an amazing self-own, you have to admit. But they're the ones that, they're the ones that did that that came up with this idea that women were sexually passive and that they didn't experience pleasure or desire in the sense. same way that men do. I think, was it better that before that there was this idea that women were raging nymph maniacs

that they still needed to be controlled? I don't know. I think the Victorians did more damage because then they start doing things like clitorectomies and chloroform and cutting ovaries out and institutionalising women and locking them away. And, you know, well, sometimes it's, they just make them have morphine. A lot of medical misogyny. Yeah. So I think probably the Victorians.

But the other thing that we've got to take away from that is how much of that applied to day-to-date life? Again, it's that middle-class thing. Like, you know, working-class women probably weren't going to the doctors going. I'm experiencing sexual desire. Please, please lie here. Prescribe me something. Prescribe me something immediately. But, yeah, the Victorians really did a number of it.

And they're still very close to us in terms of how we view sex today. Kate, it is a fantastic book. I mean that. It's a genuine triumph. The level of research care in this book is unbelievable. And I loved reading it. I really do. And to all our listeners, I cannot recommend this book enough.

It's called Flick by Dr. Kate Lister. It is out May the 8th. 28th. May the 28th. And it is just a brilliant, brilliant book. Thank you so much for writing it. Thank you. Thank you for spending this time with us.

It's been fascinating. It's been loads of things. Finally, giving us a little bit of historical legitimacy. Because we're just three idiots, really. Yeah, no, it's amazing. Thank you. I got one other final question. Oh, yep.

Which is, it springs to mind. We started off by talking about this, the Roman Dildo at the very beginning of this conversation. Are there other artefacts that do suggest that there was this enjoyment of sex that are knocking around that people can look up as well? Because I think that's a fascinating thing that people can check out online. Yes, there are. So the oldest dildo, if it is dildo, if it is, Dildo, we think it was a Dildo, the one at the Fort Vindalander, which I think they've got on show.

Go and have a look. Tell them I sent you. But we do have other examples that have survived. They tend to be really posh dildos because they're the ones that survive. So there was some in France that were made of mahogany. There have been some that have been... I love mahogany. Very fancy.

My favourite kind of wood. Very fancy. There's some, I think they're in the Science Museum. They're made of ivory. I'm really now feeling about... I'm feeling for the elephant that's being killed and then finding out. I know. You never get what you're touched about to come, mate.

The final indignity. But reading through literary evidence, it would seem that there was a big culture of making Dildos out of leather, and they just haven't survived because it's material that can perish. Oh, that's interesting. So the posh ones survive, but the poor people's ones. And then, of course, vegetables, endlessly useful for that particular purpose. But, yeah, there is evidence, and there's a lot of,

the actual physical evidence itself, the objects survive, but certainly a lot of writing about them and a lot of literary support that people have been filthy for a very long time. There you go. And you can find out all about that fact in Flick by Dr Kate Lister, a fantastic book. Do check it out and grab it. It's a fantastic read.

Thank you, Kate. That was brilliant. Thank you. Pleasure. Well, there we go. That was Dr. Kate Lister. I love that. It was a fascinating chat.

Yeah, really, really interesting. stuff. The revelatory stuff about the importance of Elvis and the mania surrounding him was far more of a kind of female liberation than I at first realized. Yeah, I love that stuff. Fascinity. Brilliant chat. Genuinely, do pick up the book. It's a fantastic read and what a lovely person. I really enjoyed that hour. We will be back with you very, very soon. As always, if there's anything you want to email to the show, our ears are always here and listening and we'd love to hear from you, but we'll see you in the near future for more History Fun. Bye-bye. Goodbye. Oh, what a time is now on Patreon.

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