Marie Stopes on sex starvation
The Cultural Construction of Sexuality
Published 1987 edited by Pat Caplan (in our library)
Page 66, chapter by Margaret Jackson.
In many respects, however, Marie Stopes’s sexual ideology was was profoundly reactionary; in common with her contemporaries she exalted the ‘thrills of the chase’ and man’s innate hunting instincts, and contradicted her own commitment to female sexual autonomy by vehemently condemning lesbianism, attacking ‘prudes’, and emphasizing that women’s orgasms should only be given by their husbands. She seemed obsessed with the need to ‘prove’ the naturalness of both heterosexuality and coitus, claiming that women deprived of regular and satisfying coitus were literally sex-starved, in the sense that they lacked the chemical substances supplied by male secretions (which their bodies absorbed if they remained long enough in the ‘post coital embrace’). She even went so far as to recommend that women thus deprived should dose themselves with daily capsules containing prostatic extracts! Furthermore, by 1928 her criticisms of male sexuality had so far evaporated as to allow her to attribute many sex crimes to men’s ‘insatiable sexual’ desires, caused by a similar lack of physiological nourishment.
Margaret Jackson works at Goldsmith’s College, London. Teaches women’s studies. She is a lesbian and revolutionary feminist and has been involved in the women’s liberation movement for about 10 years particularly in the areas of sexuality and violence against women.