Sigmund Freud barely needs an introduction. He is none other than the father of psychoanalysis; the man who gave the world the ‘ego’ and ‘Id’; the famous Austrian doctor who discovered the subconsciousness and who persuaded millions to blame (all) their problems on their mothers. But Freud also made other ‘discoveries’ which are not as often spoken about (for good reasons…) today, but the effects of which resonated through bedrooms and medical textbooks worldwide for almost a century. And those are related to Freud’s theories about female sexuality.

Freud never held females in too high a regard and didn’t make much of a secret of it. The idea of ‘penis envy’ clearly could be spawned only in the mind of a man who didn’t think women could aspire to much at all. His personal relationships with women were complex to say the least – having an affair with your own sister-in-law isn’t the best way to secure a happy marriage and blissful family life. It is perhaps no surprise then that his writings about women are full of sweeping statements on their (sexual) inferiority with little or no factual support. The surprise is that people still took his word for it at least half a century later.

Freud’s initial idea was that as women matured — emotionally and sexually — their erotic zones were ‘transferred’ from the clitoris to the vagina. This ‘reallocation’ of the center of sexual pleasure was, according to Freud, crucial for reproduction and the proper development of a heterosexual identity. Freud’s disciples went somewhat further and began interpreting the failure to achieve vaginal orgasm as a sign of frigidity and not solely sexual immaturity. In the quaintly titled “The sexually adequate female,” Frank S. Caprio, a contemporary follower of Freud’s ideas elaborated that “…whenever a woman is incapable of achieving an orgasm via coitus, provided the husband is an adequate partner, and prefers clitoral stimulation to any other form of sexual activity, she can be regarded as suffering from frigidity and requires psychiatric assistance.” (The Sexually Adequate Female, p.64.). This gem of a book was first published in 1953 — the world was a decade away from the equal pay act and Betty Friedan’s seminal ‘Feminine mystique’ — and yet here was Dr. Caprio diagnosing mental disease in women who liked making use of the only known organ whose sole biological function is to give pleasure!

Women who desired having their clitoris stimulated were thought to behave like men, because they preferred their ‘external’ organ pleasured rather than indulging in the ‘feminine passivity’ of accepting a phallus into their vagina. Consequently, it was thought that as a result of their obvious lack of feminine behaviors they were likely to be awful mothers and would probably fall victim to mental disease and general ‘social disintegration’ (talk about jumping to conclusions). A treatise on sexual issues from 1937 strongly recommends (in the spirit of disaster prevention) that if a woman is unable to reach coital orgasm, sitting astride the man ‘is certainly better than titillation of the clitoris’.

Today we know that there is absolutely no evidence for Freud’s idea of a transfer in female erotic zones — it seems he made the whole thing up sitting in his comfy Vienna office. What’s more, in light of current anatomical and sexological knowledge the whole idea seems pretty absurd (although, I’m sorry to report, the myth of a ‘better’ vaginal orgasm is still alive and well in a lot of corners around the Internet and many peoples’ minds).

The notion of a clitoral orgasm being different from a vaginal one was only really possible in a world where there was very little knowledge about female anatomy (Freud never really cared to learn any himself). What we have come to think of as the ‘clitoris’ is quite literally only the tip of the organ, which in fact can be up to 5 inches long. The internal portions of the clitoris surround the vaginal opening and canal and have more sensory endings than the relatively poorly innervated vaginal walls. Plainly speaking, ‘vaginal orgasms’ are commonly the result of either external indirect stimulation of the clitoris (perhaps the source from the partiality of many 19th century women towards ‘riding astride’ their husbands was that this position results in stimulating the clitoris without the use of hands); or internally – friction against the vaginal walls excites the nerve endings in the interior parts of the clitoris and…kazaaam! Vaginal orgasm.

However, there is much more to the (female) orgasm than just the vagina or the clitoris. Medically speaking, the orgasm is an autonomic physiologic response to various kinds of stimulation which is often (but not always) experienced or perceived as sexual. Importantly, stimulation doesn’t even have to be tactile and there is definitely no rule which says that female genitals have to be touched at all for an orgasm to take place. “Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women’s Sexual Fantasies” – Nancy Friday’s follow-up book to her ground-breaking book on female sexual fantasies “The Secret Garden” – gives numerous descriptions of women who achieved orgasm by simply fantasizing in the shower or having their nipples caressed. No penetration of any kind was involved. Now, that would be pretty much guaranteed to blow Freud’s mind if he ever heard about it. He’d probably swiftly proceed to come up with elaborate schemes about how, for example, too much education resulted in the transfer of sexuality to the brain instead of the vagina or how a perverted breast-feeding relationship with a mother could have been the cause of nipple stimulation leading women to orgasm. In fact, in his essay “The Psychology of Women” Freud actually did formulate his cure to nearly all manner of female sexual ‘neuroses’ – the “abandonment of the life of the mind”. In Freud’s opinion, women simply couldn’t handle having their brains and vaginas functioning properly at the same time. It was an “either, or” as far as Sigmund was concerned (now, maybe it’s just me, but I really think this guy seriously underestimated half the human species…).

Freud never cared much about what women themselves had to say about their sexuality. He pretty much had his mind made up before he even got started on ‘studying’ the issue. Mind you, there wasn’t any particularly useful studying to do, unless you were willing to do some actual high quality primary research with real women, which Freud wasn’t. He just listened to a few ‘experts’ and added some of his own wisdom. Importantly, back in those days, experts were all men who, similarly to Freud, did not think women could contribute to the scientific knowledge base, even if they were the object of study. These male experts reasoned that. being the superior sex, they could surely draw their own conclusions which would by definition be more insightful than anything a woman could tell them about her ‘private parts’ (also, it would spare them the embarrassment and possible accusation of indecent behavior which would have surely cropped up once word of investigations with real women would have spread).

It perhaps doesn’t take much feminist deconstructing to come to the conclusion that male doctors’ doctrines about sex had a lot to do with male expectations and experiences of sex. Men generally thought that penetrating a vagina provided for a jolly good time, so surely women must really like it too. And if they don’t, then, by golly, there must have been something wrong with them. I’ll admit – this is a bit of an oversimplification of doctors’ discourse on female sexuality prior to the 70s. But just a bit… All manner of medical professionals (psychiatrists, family doctors and gynecologists to name the most prominently involved) firmly believed that favoring clitoral stimulation makes a women “sexually inferior” because she doesn’t need a penis to have a good time. The logic was that a penis made a women complete – that’s what the cavity of the vagina is for, right? So if a woman doesn’t want to be ‘complete’, she’s surely demented in one way or another.

Thankfully, we moved past these assumptions since then, but there is still a lot of negative over-thinking going into female sexuality. As the amazing sex-educator Heather Corinna points out, “ever hear someone talk about a penis orgasm?” No? That’s because male sexuality is accepted as more natural, almost simpler in a way – men want sex. What more is there to analyze/think/talk about? Women, on the other hand…ah…now that’s more complex…they want sex but they don’t, they’re maternal and not sexual, they have different orgasms in different places and it’s all oh so complicated. I’m not saying we shouldn’t study female sexuality – far from it! But we should definitely step back and let individual people enjoy their sex lives without worrying that they have inferior orgasms or there’s something wrong with them because they guy who invented psychoanalysis said so…

What do cows’ uteruses, decreased diary production and attitudes towards women’s openly expressed sexuality have in common? Unless you’re an expert in bovine anatomy the answer may come as a surprise to you: it’s nymphomania.

Nymphomania is a term for short inter-oestrus periods in cattle, but it’s also (mainly?) used to describe women with ‘abnormal’ sexual urges. The way that this abnormality was defined has changed dramatically over time, but is best characterized with a quote from the famous Dr. Kinsey himself — “A nymphomaniac is someone who has more sex than you do.”

The story of nymphomania is a sad tale of a time when women weren’t acknowledged as sexual beings and judged/jailed/held in mental hospitals against their will if they were not willing to conform to the ideal (or rather sick contortion) of women as sexless creatures. It’s a story of women who were all forcefully classified within the virgin/whore dichotomy. The only reputable way to lose one’s virginal status was to become a wife and bear children conceived in a dark bedroom with as little pleasure as possible. Of course, at the same time it was a very different deal for men. They were mostly allowed as much premarital sex as their money could afford – as long as they weren’t defiling reputable women that is.

Well into the 20th century women weren’t supposed to like sex. Sex was thought to be something that men pursued and women unwillingly gave up so that they could fulfil their lives’ goal by bearing the heirs their husbands wanted and the little darlings they needed to lavish with their innate motherly feelings on.

The thing is, although society has largely managed to ignore this fact and a tonne of medical books has been written to the contrary, women do in fact have a sex drive. When girls hit puberty and start producing sex hormones (oestrogens as well as testosterone) they start having (consciously or not) sexual feelings. There is a small percentage (less than 1%) of the population, both female and male, that is asexual and genuinely does not want or need to have sex. The rest of us are destined to a life in which carnal urges will play a role at some point. However, the whole concept of nymphomania is built-up on the completely false assumption of sexual urges being unique and healthy to men and a sign of disease and lack of mental stability in women.

In order to understand the history and societal significance of nymphomania, we have to take a closer look at its supposed opposite: female frigidity. The latter was basically assumed to be the status quo for female sexuality in the US and much of Europe (if you weren’t a ‘working girl’ that is). There was never much evidence to back this up (ahem…I don’t know, maybe because it’s an entirely false claim?). However, this perception was likely to be fueled by anecdotal evidence from men who spent their wedding nights with terrified young wives who had no idea about sex and all of a sudden had their clothes ripped off and a penis inserted into their vagina with no prior warning (other than perhaps fumbling with breasts for a few seconds) and nothing to arouse them beforehand. Usually, the deed was done within a few minutes, the marriage consummated and legal, and the wife left thinking (quite correctly) that she’s survived something awful and dreading it happening again. As much as we may like to, we shouldn’t put all the blame on the husbands. The ‘poor’ chaps were brought up and socialized to think women take absolutely no pleasure in sex and they perceive it a mechanical act which needs to happen in order to make them mothers. Who needs foreplay if all you really want is to change diapers.

However, there were women the world round, who could not be convinced they don’t like sex. Even if everyone around them tried to convince them otherwise they still seemed to enjoy making use of their genitals for things other than procreation. And so nymphomania was born. It was defined as a multitude of behaviors ranging from “lascivious glances” and flirting through masturbation and attempts to convince husbands to have more sex, all the way to actual physical attacks on men to enforce intercourse.

It’s not a recent invention. Nymphomania, or a Dissertation Concerning the Furor Uterinus was written by an obscure French doctor, M. D. T. Bienville, and translated into English in 1775. The good doctor helpfully explained that “Eating rich food, consuming too much chocolate, dwelling on impure thoughts, reading novels, or performing “secret pollutions” (masturbating), overstimulates women’s delicate nerve fibers and leads to nymphomania.” Thank goodness there were people like Dr. Bienville to look after the “delicate nerve fibers” of women who eat too much chocolate or indulged in the obscenity of reading novels…

In the Victorian period the common perception – among the medical profession as well as patients – was that strong female sexual desire was a symptom of disease. Sexual madness was an actual concern among (mostly) “refined and virtuous” women and their physicians. And the women weren’t just worried about possible inconveniences. Openly having a libido could get a woman into serious trouble in Victorian England. And by trouble I mean an awful mental hospital that one could get locked away in for years. Shockingly, women didn’t have to want sex to be diagnosed as a nymphomaniac. The outright opposite was sometimes true and victims of sexual assault were deemed to be diagnosed with this ‘disease’ just as women who bore illegitimate children, “abused themselves” (i.e. masturbated), or were judged as promiscuous. Once at the asylum, women underwent a pelvic exam to determine a number of things including the size of their clitoris and the moistness of their vagina. If any of these were deemed unsatisfactory by the physicians the patients were forced to undergo ‘treatments’. These were nothing like the rather benign ‘vibrator therapy’ of the early 20th century and instead involved induced vomiting, bloodletting (also in the reproductive organs), restricted diet, douches to the head or breasts, and, at times, clitoridectomies (i.e. removal of clitoris).

Attitudes towards women and sexuality relaxed – in parallel with women’s growing role in society and their increased independence – and over the 19th and 20th century women were rarely locked away for wanting sex. A bit of a breakthrough for nymphomania came with Freud. The father of psychoanalysis certainly has quite a few accomplishments to his name, but he was no expert on female sexuality. Freud was a self-proclaimed misogynist and his views on women are perhaps best known thanks to his misguided (to say the least) theories on penis envy. Freud’s views on nymphomania rather missed the spot as well, but they did redirect the discourse around it. Building on his now discredited idea of the superiority of vaginal vs. clitoral orgasms, Freud and his disciples claimed that, far from being a sign of excessive sexuality, nymphomania actually sprang from frigidity. The sexually immature woman, they argued, was unable to orgasm during intercourse and took lovers in order to achieve sexual satisfaction. And so for a time nymphomania became the disease of unsatisfied women. With this we were getting closer to the crux of the matter – nymphomania is in fact a term that describes women who like sex and are willing to actively pursue. Sounds familiar? Ah, right. Isn’t that what we expect of healthy males?

As the sexual revolution rolled around, the medical establishment, as well as regular people, became more accustomed with the fact that women can in fact enjoy sex without being mentally ill and the psychiatric definitions changed in step with societal perception. Distressingly, the term held out in court rooms for an inexcusably long-time – nymphomania was commonly used in rape cases to defend male rapists – “the victim didn’t just ‘ask for it’, your Honour she basically threw herself at my client, this sick nymphomaniac women.”

A brief overview of the history of nymphomania as seen through the American Psychiatric Association’s official guide to madness – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) – is fairly illuminating about more than just development of psychiatry. In DSM-1 nymphomania was listed as a “sexual deviation”. When DSM-III was published in 1980 nymphomania was ‘degraded’ to a “psychosexual disorder”. By 1987 nymphomania and its male counterpart, Don Juanism, had been replaced them with “distress about a pattern of repeated sexual conquests or other forms of nonparaphilic (nondeviant) sexual addiction.” In 1994 (DSM-IV) even sexual addiction was abandoned and straightdope.com has a great explanation for why this happened: “perhaps because the non-gender-specific nature of the term laid bare the speciousness of the whole project: If men as well as women can be sex addicts, and if many male victims (Bill Clinton, Joe Namath) are successful, admired, and largely unrepentant, it seems stupid to characterize as an illness what a lot of people would consider an accomplishment.”

Curiously, according to the WHO women can still suffer from nymphomania. The WHO’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) includes “Excessive Sexual Drive” which is divided into satyriasis for males and nymphomania for females, and “Excessive Masturbation”. What makes this even more curious is that there is no definition of “excessive sexual drive” (Dr. Kinsey had a pretty good suggestion…) and doctors “considering such a diagnosis are advised to formulate their own criteria of excessive sexual drive”. For some reason when it comes to tuberculosis, AIDS or schizophrenia doctors aren’t left the leeway to come up on the spot with what constitutes a disease symptom but when it’s an issue concerning our sex lives we’re (or at least the WHO is) happy to hand it over to them. This is potentially dangerous as we’ve seen how much of what defines healthy sexuality has nothing to do with health but everything to do with societal conventions.

In the 21st century we’re slowly moving past policing women’s sexuality (and men’s – but let’s be honest, we never really cared so much about their ‘sleeping around’ anyway). However, pop-culture and our daily lives – I’m sure – abound with examples of how we judge women’s sexual conduct differently (read: more harshly) then men’s. For example, in a recent episode of “How I Met Your Mother” (a hugely popular sit-com hailed as the new “Friends,” one of the main characters says that if he were to meet a women and have sex with her the same day she would be a “huge slut.” It doesn’t seem to occur to him (or his best friend with whom he’s having the conversation and who nods approvingly all the way through) to judge himself on the decision to have sex within hours of meeting someone. He’d just be doing what all dudes want to do – aim to have a ton of sex, right? She’d, on the other hand, be a “slut.”

It’s important to see slut-shaming for what it is – a new incarnation of “nymphomaniac-shaming.” Women used to be judged as crazy for liking sex, now they’re just ‘immoral’ if they have ‘too much of it’ (according to a recent survey the number of sex partners a women has to have to merit being called a slut is … five).

Nymphomania isn’t quite dead. It pops up every now and again – usually in the close company of the phrase ‘sex-crazed’. It’s not as damning as it used to be. The term doesn’t sentence women to years in mental institutions anymore; it’s more of a joke. “Slut” is the new, dangerous bad word. Again, no mental institutions are involved, but societal ostracism can be as bad as ever. We, as a society, should remember about nymphomania’s fate every time women are slut-shamed. And most of all, we should remember the moral of that story: female sexuality has a (continuous) history of being unreasonably judged and policed and unless we put a definite stop to it, gender equality will continue to be a goal and not reality.

Interested in how orgasms work? Always wanted to know about sexual stimulation and gratification in males and females? Scientific American magazine delves deep (very deep) into the brain and tells you how and why the brain works with orgasms and sexual pleasure.