The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science

by Armand Marie Leroi

BUT ENOUGH OF anatomy. What are Aristotle’s views on the female orgasm? He thinks that women want sex – lots of it. Sexual intercourse is ta aphrodisia. He describes highly sexed women as aphrodisiazomenai. Adolescent girls have to be watched since they have a natural impulse to use their developing sexual faculties. They may even contract bad habits (a veiled warning against masturbation?), but usually settle down after having had a few children. Some women are, however, as wanton as mares. Nymphomaniacs are literally ‘stallion-mad’ (hippomanousi). The Greeks lacked a technical term for orgasm so Aristotle simply speaks of the ‘pleasure’ or ‘intense pleasure’ of sex. But he certainly thinks that women typically have them; his models of male and female sexuality are very similar. In women ‘the pleasure of intercourse is caused by touch in the same region of the female as the male’ – which suggests that by ‘pleasure’ he means orgasm and by ‘the same region’ he means the glans and the clitoris. True, he has a name for the former, balanos, but not for the latter, but, to give credit where credit is due, he seems to have found it. Some women, he says, when experiencing pleasure ‘in a way comparable to a man’, produce a saliva-like fluid which is different from the menstrual fluid. That must be vaginal lubrication. Sometimes there’s a lot of it, more than a man’s emission – apparently a reference to female ejaculation. When women have pleasure, and secrete this sexual fluid, it...