Guest Writer: Caroline Hood
For centuries, female sexuality has been treated as a commodity to be protected, preserved, and contained. It must be bestowed upon the right person, at the right time, under the right circumstances. It is the flower we’re told not to give away (until we’re expected to), a gift reserved for one person only, reverent and holy.
There is a contract embedded within Western sexual culture: women can have protection, legitimacy, and safety, but only in exchange for surrendering authority over our sexuality.
Protection, but at a Price
In 1563, the Catholic Church changed the rules governing how marriages were recognised. Previously, canon law recognised marriages created through mutual consent, even when vows were exchanged privately.¹
This presented problems. A man could promise marriage, have sex with a woman, and subsequently deny the marriage existed.² A decree, Tametsi, attempted to address this by requiring marriages to be entered into publicly.¹
There was protection in this shift. And this matters: patriarchal institutions haven’t survived for centuries by offering women absolutely nothing.
Marriage offered legitimacy, social standing, and economic security. But the institution providing that protection defined the legitimate location for female sexuality, determining what was allowed.
Protection and control often come as a set. Think gangs, cults, and the mafia. There is protection within these “families”, but it comes at the expense of personal autonomy.
The boundary provides protection, but the system drawing the boundary wields power.
Protection Became Purity
Within Victorian ideals, women were elevated as the moral centre of the home, creating a sanctuary from the roughness of the outside world.³ Coventry Patmore gave this archetype an enduring name in his 1854 poem The Angel in the House:
“Man must be pleased; but him to please / Is woman’s pleasure.”⁴
Her pleasure was his pleasure.
The ideal woman wasn’t entirely powerless. She possessed moral authority within the home, but her elevated position came with conditions. She was selfless, never self-directed. Her value came from being desired, needed, and revered, but never from her own desires.
Sexual purity culture wasn’t an erasure of women’s sexuality. Quite the opposite. Women’s sexuality was centred and made incredibly prominent. Her virginity and fidelity mattered. Her sexual availability within marriage mattered. Crossing an invisible sexual line could alter her social identity and material security.⁵
Female sexuality was everywhere, being discussed, protected, moralised, and regulated.
Absent were her own desire and agency.
Morality Became Biology
Religion told women what was virtuous. Nineteenth-century medicine told women what was natural.
British physician William Acton wrote: “I should say that the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.”⁶ A moral assumption became a biological assumption, and thus became truth.
A woman was taught that she shouldn’t experience sexual desire. The absence of desire was then presented as evidence of a healthy woman.
The sexually restrained woman was virtuous, pure, and biologically normal.
The Privacy Problem
Alongside these developments came the elevation of the private home.³ Privacy can be wonderful. It protects intimacy, vulnerability, and freedom from intrusion. But privacy can also protect power from scrutiny.⁷
The marital rape exemption makes this contradiction clear. English common law accepted for centuries the proposition that a wife had given sexual consent through marriage that she could not retract.⁸ The House of Lords finally rejected that exemption in R v R in 1991.⁹
I was eight years old in 1991, only twenty years away from entering my own marriage. The Spice Girls were a few years from hitting it big while English law was still dismantling the idea that marriage equalled sexual consent.
The Rules Changed. The Control Didn’t.
In 2026, my sex life is unimaginable compared to women who came before me.
I can initiate sex, buy vibrators, have casual sex, watch porn, remain unmarried, divorce, have sex with women, men, both, or neither. I can want sex frequently, rarely, enthusiastically, or not at all.
I can write publicly about desire, pleasure, and how much I still want the man I’ve been with for eighteen years.
Generations of women fought like hell for this freedom. But progress doesn’t mean we’ve escaped the architecture those centuries built. Women still receive instructions about our sexuality. Today, many are disguised as empowerment.
Be sexually liberated. Initiate. Be adventurous. Be confident. Love your body. Own your sexuality. Fuck like an empowered woman.
I’m unapologetically sex-positive. I believe in sexual agency, pleasure, desire, and sustaining an erotic life across decades. But replacing good women shouldn’t want sex with empowered women should want lots of sex doesn’t liberate us if we’re still following somebody else’s rules.
The content of the rule has changed, but a rule remains.
What Do You Want?
Centuries of sexual regulation don’t disappear the moment society gives women permission to fuck. We inherit norms: religious, medical, romantic, commercial, even feminist.
These norms can present themselves despite our best intentions and thorough education. I’m educated in psychology and feminist theory. I understand the history of institutional control over women’s sexuality. And even I have moments when I’m nervous to share my desires with my husband, the person with whom I feel safest, who loves me and wants to know all parts of me.
Not because I can’t talk dirty, but because knowledge doesn’t erase inheritance.
It makes me angry that I can understand these messages and still feel them operating within me.
Female sexuality has been regulated, legislated, medicalised, and moralised for centuries. When I describe sexual agency as an act of resistance, I mean reclaiming authority over something institutions have repeatedly claimed the right to define.
After centuries of being told when to desire, how much to desire, whom to desire, and what that desire supposedly reveals about our morality, femininity, health, and worth, the most radical sexual question available to women is very fucking simple:
What do I want?
References:
Council of Trent, Session XXIV, ‘Decree on the Reformation of Marriage’, 11 November 1563, Chapter I (Tametsi), in Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, trans. H. J. Schroeder (St Louis, MO: B. Herder Book Co., 1941). The decree acknowledged the validity of earlier clandestine marriages based on mutual consent and established public marriage requirements where duly promulgated.
Charles Donahue Jr., Law, Marriage, and Society in the Later Middle Ages: Arguments About Marriage in Five Courts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
Coventry Patmore, ‘The Wife’s Tragedy’, Canto IX, in The Angel in the House (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1854).
Amanda Anderson, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life, Considered in Their Physiological, Social, and Moral Relations (London: John Churchill, 1857).
Reva B. Siegel, ‘The Rule of Love: Wife Beating as Prerogative and Privacy’, Yale Law Journal 105, no. 8 (1996): 2117–2207.
Matthew Hale, The History of the Pleas of the Crown, vol. 1 (London: Sollom Emlyn, 1736), 629.
R v R [1991] UKHL 12, [1992] 1 AC 599.
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