Female sexuality over the years

Throughout the years, normal female sexuality has walked through fields of thorns and excruciating pain inflicted by culture and ignorance. Elite medical and psychiatric professionals were the vanguard of bestial cruelty. It was a widespread medical contempt for very normal female sexuality that was also found in public life and literary works.

In the 19th century, female masturbation and nymphomania (“intense sexual desire”) were believed to be serious abnormalities that could progress to masturbatory melancholia (“extreme depression characterized by tearful sadness and irrational fears”), paralysis, blindness, and even death. . It was the psychiatrists and gynecologists who led the way by formulating ridiculous theories and devising cruel remedies. Charles Brown-Séquard, a popular endocrinologist (1817-1894) and Isaac Baker Brown (1811-1873), a gynecologist, advocated a surgical operation called a clitoridectomy, cutting off a woman’s clitoris, as a cure for the “disorder”. Unfortunately, this operation was respected and widely used in many parts of Europe. Isaac Baker Brown became very popular as one of the leading clitoridectomy surgeons.

Among his indications for the use of clitoridectomy, Isaac Baker Brown also included epilepsy, catalepsy (“a trance-like state with loss of voluntary movement and lack of reaction to stimuli”), painful menses, heavy menses, depression, insanity, hysteria and dementia (“psychic impairment of organic or functional origin”). Long after his death in 1873, clitoridectomy continued and took on a more terrifying dimension. In 1882, Zambaco of Paris, a popular physician, used cauterization without anesthesia to burn the clitoris of two girls, ages 10 and 6, caught masturbating. He used red-hot iron from the coals repeatedly on the clitoris and once on the buttocks as punishment. Clitoridectomy may have ceased to be popular in modern medical practice, but the female circumcision or female genital mutilation currently being performed in Africa and other parts of the world is clitoridectomy with surrogate names.

It was a widespread condemnation of normal female sexuality not only in the medical profession but also among the people and other professions, literary works, theaters, and pulpits. In the 19th century, hardly a novel or opera would end without the death of the woman who played the role of the sexual offence. “In medieval times, people feared three things: the devil, the Jews, and women. Female sexuality was a particular source of anxiety for men, an anxiety that continued into the early 20th century,” says John Studd.

Shortly after the beginning of the 20th century, female sexuality began to see better days. People were more enlightened and began to see things in a better light, including female sexuality. Trauma from the immediate and remote past had resulted in a drastic decrease in female sexual desire or libido and an inappropriate sexual response. This was identified as a real disorder, as opposed to the pseudo-disorder of Isaac Brown and Charles Brown-Séquard of the 19th century. Loss of libido and inadequate sexual response have been identified as Female Sexual Disorder (FSD) or Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD), conditions that must be treated by competent sexual counselors or with hormones in the form of estrogen and testosterone. Today there are various brands of sexual pills and creams to enhance or repair the loss of libido and low sexual response in women.

Not only this. Not long ago sexual topics were taboo, not to be discussed in private or in public. Women had to quietly support their men suffering from erectile dysfunction that couldn’t be talked about anywhere until the blue pills came along. Today, sexual issues are discussed on radio and television or in public meetings. Women are now free to express how they feel sexually. And in case of any problem, there is safe and civilized help anywhere at any time.