Female orgasm being necessary for conception was, as far as we can tell, a very commonly held belief in the 14th century throughout Europe and possibly even the near-east. At least amongst learned folks.

The idea is a very old one. The Romano-Greek physician Galen (AD 129 - circa AD 216) is frequently named when discussing the origins of this myth. Although, Galen was largely coalescing knowledge held at the time (such as the idea of the four humors), his legendary reputation popularized his works. (The idea most certainly didn’t start with him. Hippocrates and Aristotle can be argued to acknowledge some version of it. Aristotle, for his part, remarked that he found it odd that it seemed the female orgasm didn’t seem to be always necessary for conception to take place). Galen’s view of physiology loomed large in Christian Europe and the Islamic world.

To elaborate, the idea was that, as Aristotle put it, creation required both “form” and “substance”. (I won’t be using very inclusive language here, because old dead philosophers aren’t exactly known for inclusivity) In this view, the man’s “seed” provided the form and the woman’s menstrual blood (or in Galen’s view, “female semen”) provided the substance. Aristotle assigned properties to pretty much everything. Men, and thus semen, were “hot and dry”. Women, and thus menstrual blood, were “cold and moist”. Hot was better than cold. Men and women in Aristotle and Galen’s view weren’t “created different,” they were different degrees. Almost endpoints on a spectrum. The more “hot” you were, the more masculine, the “colder” you were, the more feminine. Hot seed made boy babies; cool seen made girl babies. And since “hot” was better than “cold” in this worldview, men were therefore more perfectly formed and superior to women. Relatedly, women were seen as the randy ones; having the stronger sexual appetite because of an innate “physiological need” to counteract their “cold, moist” nature with a man’s “hot and dry” nature.

Galen, for his part, at least bothered to look at human anatomy. I mean, his interpretation of sexual anatomy was faulty, but at least he was looking. From this, he concluded that sex and sexual desire worked the same way in males and females. In males, the semen came from the testes and was forcefully ejaculated during climax. In females, the “female semen” comes from the ovaries and is, likewise, reliant on orgasm for expulsion into the womb.

Galen’s views were exceedingly common amongst physicians across the old Roman world well into the modern period. The totally bitchin’ Hildegard von Bingen in the 12th century elaborated that a woman’s “pleasure” so-to-speak “drew the seed in and held it”.

At least by the 13th century, the idea that “pleasure” (if not outright orgasm, you at least had to be “in to it”. Although, “orgasm” and “pleasure” are essentially interchangeable even in modern parlance) was necessary for conception was so ingrained, a woman could not, legally, have been raped if she got pregnant from it. Because, obviously, if pleasure was necessary for conception, and she conceived, she must have derived pleasure from it, and thus “wanted it” and was not raped. Blech. Icky, I know.

The movie in question, The Last Duel (2021), is based on true events. We have much of the court proceedings of the trial in question. Marguerite de Thibouville, wife of Jean de Carrouges, was visibly pregnant at the time of the trial. This pregnancy was not considered proof that rape had occurred specifically because it was assumed at the time that pregnancy could not result from rape.

Lest we judge too harshly, this idea persisted long past the 14th century. Galen’s views were more or less standard until the late 18th century. The “pregnancy-won’t-happen-from-rape” myth persisted in the legal sphere, though some people were starting to question it, for a while longer. By the 1820s, judges in the United States were finally seeing the argument as not holding water.

Although—dipping up to the modern day and well past the historian’s 20-year rule—even though modern medical science knows that female orgasm is not necessary for conception, the idea has not entirely vanished from our popular consciousness. Speculation since the early 20th about female orgasms perhaps increasing the chance of conception is very popular (although never conclusively demonstrated). A quick google search returns countless occurrences of people asking that same question today. And, risking the wrath of Rule 2, perhaps you remember back in 2012 when Representative Todd Akin (who sat on the House Science and technology Committee at the time) infamously declared that the female body will “shut that whole thing down” in the event of “legitimate rape”.

Maybe we’re not as far removed from the past as we would like to think.