Why, in the last two centuries, have women become to be considered less sexual than men, if, throughout history, they were believed to have a much higher libido?

by [deleted]

I am writing my undergraduate thesis about Dracula, and while researching sources that spoke about female sexuality, I ended up reading two history books: Guy Bechtel's Les Quatre Femmes de Dieu and Jean Delumeau 's La Peur en Occident. To my surprise, the authors stated that since Ancient History, until the end of the 18th century, women were widely believed to have much stronger sex drives than men. According to the historians:

  1. St. Jerome claimed that a woman's ability to have multiple orgasms had its origin in some form of supernatural power, where not even the blood of the dead would be able to fully satisfy them.
  2. Michel de Montaigne, in the third book of Essays, wrote that the only truth which no philosopher would ever contest was that women are infinitely more wanton than men.
  3. Jean Bodin, a contemporary of Montaigne, stated that in the dictionaries of any language, the word woman should be synonymous with 'untamed lust' and 'bestial lechery'.

If anyone knows a book/author who explains this radical historical shift, about how people saw the differences between male and female libido, please tell me here.

mimicofmodes

There's always more that can be said, but I have a past answer that may help you:

It seems that in the early 18th Century, British perceptions of sexual desire shifted from seeing women as the "lustier sex" to instead putting men in that category. What brought about this shift?