The narrative is everywhere. The West is in a sex recession. Frequency is down in Britain, the US, France, Australia. Denmark seems fine, but mostly it’s a slump. The Atlantic sounded the alarm in 2018. The Telegraph cried that sex was dying out.
As an ancient historian, this trend intrigues me. Mostly because reporters love to romanticize antiquity. They claim sex was wild and free back in Ancient Greece. It wasn’t. Especially not for women.
We think men are the hungry ones today. The Greeks disagreed. They believed women were the nymphomaniacs. Their appetite was a problem, a dangerous excess. Modern surveys say women are losing interest. Ancient surveys (if we could get them) would be shocked. Women weren’t bored. They were considered too interested.
There was a medical theory to prove it. The wandering womb.
According to the Hippocratic Corpus, the uterus isn’t fixed. It floats. If it gets dry, it moves upward. It lodges under the diaphragm. You lose your voice. Maybe you suffocate. The cure? Sex. Regularly. To keep the organs moist and anchored. It sounds absurd now. It wasn’t then. Apuleius, a Roman from the second century, used this exact excuse when accused of magical abduction. He claimed his wife married him to treat her illness. To stop suffocating.
Sex was a chore of survival. Prescriptive. Penetrative. By a husband. No talk of pleasure for the woman. Just the biological imperative of dampening down that restless organ. It was treated as an sickness to be managed.
Somewhere recently, the script flipped. We stopped thinking women were naturally hungry. Now we think their desire is buried. Hidden. Waiting for excavation. Kate Lister called it out in her recent work Flick. She pointed to the lie of “lying back and thinking of England.” Sex is for the man. The woman endures it.
I felt this shift while writing my own book, Aphrodisia. Katherine Angel noted something sharp: we frame both genders as biologically driven. But men are the hunters. The seed-spreaders. Women? Complicated.
So history gives us two bad boxes. Women are either voracious beasts or dormant puzzles. Aren’t both views just ways of ignoring individual reality?
We have no stats on ancient orgasm rates. But we have clues. Oral sex? Disgusting. Aristophanes called it a tongue pollutant. Galen compared it to eating feces. If modern women need more than penetration to climax, ancient attitudes likely crushed their satisfaction.
But they found ways.
Pleasure doesn’t require permission. It just requires opportunity.
Sappho wrote poems about her lovers. About flower crowns. About the warmth of another woman’s skin. Anonymous Roman women carved graffiti in Pompeii. Kisses. Embraces. Graffiti on bathroom stalls isn’t new. Neither are dildos. Archaeology finds them everywhere. Greek vases show women holding two, pointing one at each target. Leather stuffed. Wood carved. The Vindolanda phallus from Roman Britain was long dismissed as a sewing tool until historians reconsidered in 2023. It had been handled. Used. Almost exclusively by women.
Context matters. Emily Nagoski wrote Come As You Are years ago. Sex isn’t just genitals. It’s economics. Stress. Housing. Young people can’t move out. Women defer sex because of pain and anxiety. The gap isn’t just libido. It’s environment.
Maybe the problem isn’t our drives. It’s a society that polices them. Whether it’s a 4th-century BC doctor telling you to have sex or die, or a news headline shaming celibacy. Desires vary. They are diverse. Rich. We aren’t a monolith.
In my research, I looked for the rule-breakers. Sulpicia. A poet who loved her partner Cerinthus loudly. Heraeis and Sophia. Greek-Egyptian women casting love spells for other women. Cassia. A Roman who petitioned courts to criminalize male adultery. She lost. But she tried.
She saw the double standard.
What if we looked at sex through her eyes? What if we stopped counting frequency? What if we asked quality? The ancient poet Nossis called pleasure sweeter than spit-honey. Can we get back there?
We need to ask how often people are having good sex. Not just sex.
