Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation by Elissa Stein, Susan Kim Page B

sailor”; it’s not called the world’s oldest profession for nothing.
    But what intrigues us is the fact that women’s sexuality—both its repression and expression—has been perceived in such doggedly detached, clinical, and deliberately nonerotic terms, for thousands of years, whether consciously or unconsciously, as both the source of and solution to a concocted medical problem. Men have admittedly come up with some wacky notions before, but to us, this one really takes the cake.
    So how did this all come about? And why?
    And what is hysteria, anyway?
    Hysteria was perhaps the greatest false diagnosis ever made in the history of Western medicine: a phony medical condition dating back to even before ancient Greece and only bowing out as an official disease when the American Psychiatric Association finally dropped the term in 1952. It included such an extraordinary range of symptoms, it’s hard to imagine anyone reaching a diagnosis with a straight face. A partial list includes: nervousness, insomnia, faintness, chills, fluid retention, heaviness in the abdomen, depression, headache, upset stomach, loss of appetite, shortness of breath, irritability, unexplained laughter or crying, anxiety, a choking sensation, muscle spasms, convulsions, fatigue, loss of appetite, cold hands, cold feet, loss of sexual interest, heaving of the chest, a sudden throwing back of the head and body, “the tendency to cause trouble,” and on, and on, and on, ad infinitum. Symptoms allegedly ran one Victorian doctor seventy-five pages in an unfinished list. And as one scans the seemingly bottomless inventory, one cannot help but notice the distinctly sexual nature of many of the symptoms: anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability, nervousness, erotic fantasy, sensations of heaviness in the abdomen, lower pelvic swelling, vaginal lubrication.
    From the very beginning, hysteria was believed to be caused by the uterus and was even named after that pear-shaped pelvic pouch. And what we find especially telling is that the uterus, funnily enough, is the only female organ for which there is no male counterpart.
    Think about it: men have breasts, the ovaries and testicles are both gonads, and one can go on and on throughout both male and female bodies, finding reasonable equivalents. But a male uterus? Nothing even comes close, unless one is generous and counts a beer belly. And thus due to its inherently and exclusively female essence, not to mention its seemingly magical ability to make babies, the innocent womb has since time immemorial been both whipping boy and Rorschach inkblot to men, the object of far too much masculine speculation and fantasy, as well as the brunt of their frequently cruel medical attentions.
    In an ancient Egyptian papyrus from around 1900 B.C. (one of the earliest records in medical history, we’d like to point out), aberrant behavior in women was already being commented on and the theory put forth that a wandering uterus was the root of their problems. As a result, Egyptian doctors routinely fed noxious substances to their female patients, hoping to drive the uterus away from the lungs and throat. Alternately, they placed sweet-smelling substances on the vulva, trying to coax it back into place. The ancient Greeks (who otherwise made huge strides in medical knowledge and conceivably should have known better) agreed wholeheartedly that the uterus was in fact rampaging through the body, in a frantic search for babies.
    And so what was the cure for a cranky womb? The Greeks decided that the only way to both cheer it up and promptly relieve the symptoms of hysteria was marriage—or to put it more bluntly, lots and lots of sex. Marital relations would satisfy the uterus’s need for moisture (from semen, if we need to draw you a picture), as well as give it those babies it was seeking so desperately.
    Prescribing marital sex for hysteria was popular until the Middle Ages, when fundamentalist religious fervor replaced rational