Hypersexuality and a short history of misunderstood horniness.
For centuries, sexual desire of pretty much any kind by women was seen as morally wrong and something to be quelled—women were expected to be sexually compliant but not have any agency or desire of their own, and if they did, something was desperately wrong. It was a shitty deal, however one looks at it, where the options were essentially different types of misery.
In the nineteenth century, the thinking was that the only desire a woman should have was to get married and have babies—a thought that was seen to be backed up by science. The idea of evolution was fairly new and still being figured out, and the accepted interpretation was that women’s involvement with sex began and ended with breeding.
A name was coined for what was seen as excessive female sexual desire—nymphomania—and physicians began investigating cures. Causes as varied as divorce, excessive brandy, and frigidity were all seen as contributing to it, as well as reading too much. The worry was that untreated, nymphomania would inevitably lead to “masturbatory melancholia, paralysis, blindness, and death”.
In 1856, a 24-year-old woman known only as “Mrs. B” was given a choice: be admitted to an asylum or undergo treatment for the excessive sexual demands she was accused of placing on her husband. Mrs. B not only insisted on having sex three or four times nightly but also enjoyed it more than Mr. B was comfortable with, experiencing what he termed ‘excessive excitement’.
To avoid being committed, she was treated by Horatio Storer, a gynecologist and anti-abortion activist. Storer was perhaps not the best person to be treating anyone, as he saw married sex without the express purpose of having children as "nothing less than legalized prostitution." Mrs. B’s treatment involved foregoing sex entirely, as well as giving up brandy, meat, and reading novels—anything that could contribute to her ‘lascivious dreams’. Every night she had to administer an enema and swabbed her vagina with borax (an alkaline substance arguably best known now for being mixed with glue by YouTubers to make slime). Eventually, she stopped making her outlandish demands and became quiet and ‘chaste’ in her demeanor: job done, sexual happiness denied, well done everybody.
German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing described “Messalina syndrome” in his 1886 book Psychopathia Sexualis, a study of everything he viewed as sexually disordered. He named it after a Roman queen from the first century, the third wife of emperor Claudius, who had a (massively exaggerated) reputation for being particularly promiscuous and was once said to have bedded 25 men in 24 hours.
The same year, American doctor Theophilus Parvin came up with his own cure for nymphomania—an all-vegetable diet, regular exercise, and the application of cocaine to the vagina. Other “prescriptions” involved leeches and occasionally, horrendously, removing the clitoris.
In the twentieth century, science began accepting and even, in some extreme cases, attempting to understand female sexual desire. Among other things, this meant (eventually) abandoning the idea of ‘nymphomania’ as a medical condition. Sex therapist Robert Weiss has written of his dislike of the word nymphomaniac, calling it “an antiquated and demeaning word used to denigrate sexual women. It is not a medical or psychiatric diagnosis, and it is certainly not helpful to anyone.”
There is an enormous difference between a high sex drive and a harmful behavior pattern. A high sex drive is not a problem. Compulsive sexual behavior, where potential dangers or negative consequences are serially ignored, or someone feels out of control, can be, but that is something else entirely. Hypersexuality or sexual compulsivity can be symptoms of other conditions or simply their own thing, and it is a bit of a controversial topic in academia. A 2010 paper in The Journals Of Sex Research argues that sexual compulsivity is a myth, and sexual behaviors are simply held to a different set of standards than other ones.
These days the word ‘nymphomaniac’ is only really used jokingly or in art films, but the condition only left the DSM in 1980. Accepting that everyone gets horny is a relatively recent breakthrough—while a lot has happened in the last forty years, it took centuries to come this far.
