writing in the dust

Indeed, the first sexual revolution was characterised by an extraordinary reversal in assumptions about female sexuality. Ever since the dawn of western civilisation it had been presumed that women were the more lustful sex. As they were mentally, morally and physically weaker than males, it followed that they were less able to control their passions and thus (like Eve) more likely to tempt others into sin. Yet, by 1800, exactly the opposite idea had become entrenched. Now it was believed that men were much more naturally libidinous and liable to seduce women. Women had come to be seen as comparatively delicate and sexually defensive, needing to be constantly on their guard against male rapacity. The notion of women’s relative sexual passivity became fundamental to sexual dynamics across the western world. Its effects were ubiquitous – they still are.

A crucial reason was the rise of women as public writers, which introduced into the cultural mainstream powerful new female perspectives on courtship and lust. This was an unprecedented development. In all earlier times, women’s direct intervention in public discussion had been very limited. Men monopolised every medium in which male and female qualities were prescribed and reinforced – fiction, drama, poetry, sermons, journalism and so on. But from the later 17th century onwards, women emerged for the first time as a permanent part of the world of letters. As playwrights, poets, novelists and philosophers, women influenced male authors, looked to one another, and addressed themselves directly to the public. And in much female writing about sexual relations, the bottom line was, as the teenage poet Sarah Fyge explained in 1686, that men were always trying “to make a prey” of chaste women. Male bluster about female lust was but to make women “the scapegoat” – it was men who constantly pressured and ensnared women, who were insatiable in their thirst for new conquests, and shameless in their commission. As the feminist Mary Astell put it bitterly in 1700, “‘Tis no great matter to them if women, who were born to be their slaves, be now and then ruined for their entertainment”. No woman could ever “be too much upon her guard”.