If women were handed an award for putting up with mixed messages, we’d need a bigger trophy cabinet. For literally thousands of years, society has had exactly one consistent opinion about women’s sexuality: it’s a problem. Too interested in sex? Calm down, harlot. Not interested enough? Have you tried yoga, oysters, hormone pellets, lingerie, a gratitude journal, and making eye contact with your partner for exactly seven uninterrupted minutes? It’s almost impressive how we’ve managed to go from diagnosing women for having sexual feelings to diagnosing them for not having enough. Grab your favorite beverage, because we’re taking a wildly inappropriate tour through the history of women’s sexual health.
It All Started by Blaming the Uterus
Ancient medicine was…creative. The Ancient Greeks genuinely believed the uterus could wander around the body like a tiny drunk roommate, bumping into organs and causing emotional chaos. Anxiety? Wandering womb. Fainting? Wandering womb. Feeling sad, irritable, or simply existing as a woman with emotions? You guessed it—wandering womb. The diagnosis of hysteria even comes from the Greek word hystera, meaning uterus, meaning women spent centuries having every emotion imaginable blamed on an organ that, inconveniently for this theory, stays pretty well attached. Imagine if every time a man got grumpy we blamed his spleen. “Sorry Steve’s being difficult today. His pancreas is acting up.” Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Exactly.
The Victorians Somehow Made Everything Weirder
If the Victorians had a family motto, it would’ve been, “Never discuss sex…while obsessing over it constantly.” Respectable women were expected to be delicate little flowers who tolerated sex purely as a charitable service to their husbands. Pleasure wasn’t something “good women” were supposed to desire, and female sexuality was either ignored or viewed with suspicion. Meanwhile, women continued having bodies with hormones, nerve endings, and perfectly normal sexual feelings that stubbornly refused to cooperate with Victorian etiquette. Doctors often diagnosed women with “hysteria,” a catch-all label for everything from anxiety and insomnia to irritability and general dissatisfaction. In many ways, it became a convenient medical explanation for women whose experiences didn’t fit neatly into society’s expectations. Translation? “She’s making us uncomfortable, and we’d rather invent a diagnosis than actually listen.”
Enter the Vibrator
Now let’s talk about history’s most misunderstood invention: the vibrator. You’ve probably heard the story that doctors invented vibrators to give women orgasms as a treatment for hysteria. It’s a fantastic story—and one that’s been repeated in countless books, articles, and movies. The problem is that historians have largely debunked it. There simply isn’t strong evidence that doctors were routinely prescribing orgasms in the dramatic way pop culture suggests. The real story is still wonderfully bizarre. During the late 1800s, electricity was the newest technological obsession, and inventors were attaching electric motors to just about everything. Vibrators entered the market as one of many household and medical devices claiming to improve circulation, reduce aches and pains, relieve fatigue, and promote general wellness. Some advertisements hinted at more intimate uses with all the subtlety of a Victorian wink, and it didn’t take long for women to discover those “additional applications.” Society had spent centuries pretending women didn’t experience sexual pleasure, only to accidentally invent one of the most recognizable pleasure devices in history. Honestly, you couldn’t write better irony.
The Clitoris: Medicine’s Greatest Oversight
Then there’s the clitoris, arguably the most neglected organ in medical history. It’s the only human organ whose primary known purpose is pleasure, which apparently made generations of medical researchers collectively shrug and say, “We’ll get back to that later.” For centuries, anatomy textbooks either barely mentioned it or ignored much of its internal structure altogether. In fact, comprehensive medical understanding of the clitoris is surprisingly recent. Women were expected to navigate pregnancy, childbirth, menstruation, menopause, and relationships while one of the most important structures involved in sexual function was practically omitted from the conversation. It’s hard not to wonder how different healthcare might look today if women’s pleasure had been considered just as worthy of study as men’s from the very beginning.
The Sexual Revolution…and a Whole New Set of Expectations
By the twentieth century, things finally began to change. Birth control gave many women greater reproductive autonomy, researchers started studying female sexuality more seriously, and conversations around pleasure became less taboo. It felt like progress—and in many ways, it absolutely was. But as women gained more freedom to embrace their sexuality, society quietly replaced one impossible standard with another. Instead of expecting women to have no sexual desire at all, we suddenly began expecting them to have an amazing libido, incredible orgasms, adventurous sex lives, perfectly balanced hormones, and unwavering confidence. Apparently, empowerment came with a performance review.
Welcome to the Wellness Industrial Complex
Today, if your sex drive changes—which, newsflash, happens because you’re a human being—you’ll have approximately 4,000 Instagram ads reminding you that you’re somehow broken. Feeling stressed? Low libido. Raising toddlers? Low libido. Working sixty-hour weeks? Low libido. Going through perimenopause? Definitely low libido. Existing in late-stage capitalism? Believe it or not…low libido. Thankfully, there’s always someone ready to sell you a gummy, tincture, supplement, hormone pellet, wearable device, breathing technique, or a seven-step morning routine involving cold plunges and adaptogens. Because heaven forbid we acknowledge that chronic stress, sleep deprivation, relationship dynamics, medications, hormonal changes, or simply being exhausted might influence sexual desire. Somewhere along the way, women’s libido became another productivity metric, as though it should operate at peak performance every single day of the year.
Maybe We’ve Been Asking the Wrong Question All Along
Here’s what history keeps teaching us: women’s sexuality has never actually been the problem. Society’s expectations have. For centuries, women were told they wanted sex too much. Today, many women are told they don’t want it enough. It’s the same story wearing different clothes. Healthy sexuality isn’t measured by how often you have sex, how many orgasms you have, or whether you meet someone else’s idea of “normal.” It’s about understanding your own body, having access to accurate information, recognizing when something genuinely needs medical attention—and when it doesn’t—and feeling empowered to make choices that are right for you. It’s about being able to say yes when you want to, no when you don’t, and changing your mind without shame.
After thousands of years of wandering wombs, mysterious diagnoses, ignored anatomy, impossible standards, and enough contradictory advice to make anyone need a lie down, perhaps the most revolutionary idea isn’t that women should have more sex or less sex. It’s that women’s sexual health was never meant to satisfy society’s expectations in the first place. It exists to support women’s wellbeing, pleasure, autonomy, and quality of life. And frankly, after a few thousand years of everyone else trying to define it for us, it’s about damn time women got the final say.
